Earthbound Battle Backgrounds Website

This interesting, and even slightly useful, website combines the various layers that the cult classic SNES JRPG Earthbound uses to construct its funky battle backgrounds. There are more combinations here than actually appear in the game. There is a GIF-making function, but it seems to be broken for the moment. You can still make them full-screen and save screenshots, that’s what I did, though unfortunately doing it that way means they aren’t animated.

Here are a few still examples.

Earthbound Battle Backgrounds (a bona-fide website!)

Baseball Bits on Barry Bonds

Here’s a really different post on something that only borrows the aesthetics from video games, but does so in an entertaining way. It’s the Youtube series Baseball Bits on the channel Foolish Baseball, which makes explainers about a lot of different topics related to baseball. Not video baseball; real, Major League Baseball. As such I normally wouldn’t be too interested, but they do a good job of their explanations, and it’s not difficult to follow along.

As an example, here is their recent 19-minute piece on controversial baseball superstar and incredible hulk Barry Bonds, that distills the essence of his long career into four plate appearances.

If this is of absolutely no interest to you, believe me, I understand. I don’t intend to turn this into a real-life sports blog any time soon. But I thought the use of 16-bit video game aesthetics to talk about something that has nothing direct to do with video games is interesting. It’s possible that this pixel-art kind of vibe has staying power, and people will still be referring to it, making it, enjoying it decades to come. Hey I can dream, right?

If you want to find out more about this “Barry Bonds” person, it’s even further afield, but Jon Bois at Secret Base did a great demonstration of the fear he projected upon the sport of baseball in his own video asking: what if Barry Bonds played baseball without a bat? (13 minutes)

Now that that’s done, I’m going to play video games for a while, and try to forget that there ever was such a thing as professional sports. Ta!

Sundry Sunday: Zelda and Link are Gremlins Actually

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

I thought the colloquialism was goblins? Gremlins fits pretty well for these videos though. Take a look. They’re all from Youtube animator RibbitSpell.

The first (1 1/2 minutes) is where the post title comes from, positing a time after all the adventure stuff is over and Link and Zelda are just hanging out and doing whatever. What did they get up to after Tears of the Kingdom? Why don’t we ever see them just hanging out? The games rarely tell us, so a lot of room is left for fans to fill in the gaps:

The title of the second (1 minute), “Zelda but you play as Zelda,” leaves out that you play as gremlin Zelda.

And one more, Ganon’s Rude Re-Awakening (30 seconds).

We get versions where Link is a cartoon character, where there’s four Links and where Link dies over and over and where he’s a train conductor, and now (at last) where we play as Zelda. Why don’t we get an official take where Link and Zelda canonically team up to cause random silly trouble all across Hyrule? Probably leaving Old Man Ganon to shake his fist at them as they run away, having left flaming sacks of dog crap on the doorstep of his big evil castle.

SGDQ 2024 Begins Tomorrow!

The past couple of years of Games Done Quick, the best-known speedrunning charity marathon out there, has seen contributions decline a bit, but it still brings in over two million dollars each year. Here’s wishing them well for their next major event, which begins tomorrow, June 30th!

Every time a GDQ happens I make a huge post about interesting games (to me) when they’re being run, and what’s interesting about them. This here is that post for SGDQ 2024. Times given are US Eastern time, so count three hours earlier for Pacific, four hours later to get to Greenwich Mean. Lettuce bee gin!

Sunday, June 30th

1 PM – Yoshi’s Story, All Melons: Yoshi’s Story, the N64 Yoshi game, was often derided when it came out as a kiddie game. You have to remeber, back then everyone was up in arms that there existed Barney the Dinosaur. But as often happens with Nintendo, there’s more going on with Yoshi’s Story than there seems at first. Not only is it the first Nintendo game to use the handmade arts & crafts appearance gimmick, but it’s really a score attack game, and the way to get the highest score is to collect melons. Every level is full of fruit, and eating 30 of any kind will finish the level. You can sometimes finish a level really quickly that way. But the best fruit is Melons, and there’s only 30 Melons in every level. Doing an all-melon run turns a quick and easy game into an ordeal, requiring you to actually play through all of each level, and that’s what this run is trying for.

3:50 PM – Mega Man 9: MM9 came out in 2008, 16 years ago. Can you believe it? I can, I’ve learned to stop being surprised at the passage of time. More time has passed since the release of MM9 than had passed between it and the release of the last NES Mega Man game, Mega Man 6. I don’t enjoy making you feel old, but I feel like, if I have to feel old, then you have to too.

6:07 PM – Splatoon 3: Side Order, New Game+: This is the recent DLC, so a lot of rapidly-evolving tech should be available to see.

7:00 PM – Pokemon Violet, Teal Mask: This is also DLC, for an endgame continuation of Violet’s story. Pokemon speedruns tend to be highlights of each GDQ.

9:o4 PM – Halo 2, Legendary Difficulty: Surprise, I’m calling out a non-Nintendo (Nontendo?) game! This is the PC version too.

10:49 PM – Tomb Raider I Remastered, Any% Glitched: The game is Tomb Raider I-III Remastered, but the run is just the remake of the first game. If you remember the original fondly and never checked in with the remakes, this is a good chance to see what you’ve been missing. (Apparently, what you’ve been missing is glitches!)

Monday, July 1st

12:16 AM (that’s 16 minutes after midnight) – Enter the Gungeon, Rainbow Turbo All Flows (No AWP) Race: Roguelite games and randomizers are always great spectacles, because you aren’t watching people who have practiced doing the same exactly thing for hundreds of hours. They’re playing the game in a more interactive way, reacting to the spicy mean the game serves them up. “Rainbow” mode means the game spawns a variety of items at the beginning of each floor, including two items guaranteed to be of high quality. The player can only take one of them though.

5:27 AM – Smart Ball: As GDQ events have evolved, 8-bit and 16-bit games have gotten less common.

7:50 AM – Live A Live, Twilight of Edo Japan, Present Day and Prehistory Eras: The remake of the Super Famicom JRPG classic that was released about a year ago. This is only covering three of the nine chapters of the game, but since they’re largely self-contained it works out. They picked three of the most interesting chapters. Twilight of Edo is a terrific branching scenario, reminiscent of the most complex TTRPG modules, with many ways to tackle it. Present Day by contrast is the shortest chapter, consisting of only a series of boss battles. And Prehistory is a fairly traditional JRPG story, with the caveat that it’s nearly wordless through.

8:45 AM – Ecco: The Tides of Time, and 9:27 AM – Puggsy: Two Genesis games, not often seen at GDQ, and both about half an hour long.

10:49 AM – Turnip Boy Robs A Bank: The sequel to the comedy indie title Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, which has appeared at GDQ events before.

1:41 PM – Sonic Project ’06; 2:21 PM – Sonic Robo Blast 2; 3:08 PM – Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles: A whole buncha Sonic, two of them fan creations. Sonic Project ’06 is a WIP remake of the infamous 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game. Sonic Robo Blast 2 is a fangame, also in development, that uses the Doom engine. And S3&K is the “complete” version of Sonic 3 on the Genesis, the version that comes about by attaching its cartridge to Sonic & Knuckles with that game’s “lock-on technology.”

7:00 PM – Spelunky, All Journal Entries: Another roguelite. Winning the game, and through Hell, is necessary, but only the beginning.

8:05 – Bonus Game: Balatro, 3 Deck Random Seed, Skipless: Balatro is still teh hotenss at the moment. I’ve played lots of it, so naturally I’m going to point it out here. A “3 Deck” run seems to mean winning the game three times (finishing Ante 8), each with a different deck. Not being able to skip is a substantial drawback.

Tuesday, July 2nd

2:05 AM – Doom 64 (2020), “Watch Me Die Speed”: Watch Me Die seems to be like classic Doom’s Ultra-Violence difficulty. I don’t know what Watch Me Die Speed is.

4:52 AM – Castlevania Legends: A disliked Gameboy installment in the series.

5:32 AM – Haunted Castle: The much worse first Castlevania arcade game. The fact that it’s as GDQ yet says 1CC attempt should say everything that needs saying about its difficulty.

8:21 AM – Virtual Boy Wario Land: A rare chance to see a Virtual Boy game played live, and at 22 minutes, it may not even be long enough to get a headache.

10:07 AM – Little Samson: This game is hugely expensive on the collector’s market. Come see why? I jest, we know why: rarity. This game marks the beginning of several other interesting titles: Mega Man X5 for Playstation, Mega Man 4 for NES, Sunset Riders for SNES, then a Wii port of Chibi-Robo as a bingo race, and then…

2:14 PM – Katamari Forever: The music will be stuck in your head for days.

4:58 PM – Quake II Enhanced (2023), N64 Maps, 100% Kills & Secrets

10:22 PM – The Outer Wilds, 100% Base Game Shipless: This is the game with the time loop, not The Outer Worlds. I always get them mixed up.

11:52 PM – Undertale Yellow, True Pacifist: A fangame based on Undertale. Might be interesting.

Wednesday, July 3rd

2:11 AM – Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, Any% No Major Glitches or Manipulation: An underrated JRPG from the SNES days. The first game was all JRPG, but the second added interesting Zelda-like puzzles, and is considered to be the highlight of the series.

7:57 AM – Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, both Episode 1

2:46 PM – PowerWash Simulator, SpongeBob DLC with 6 players: How much do you want to bet someone will pull out a Squidward impression?

4:50 PM – Super “Sonic Saves the World” World, Abridged%: This is a romhack with a humorous angle. Since it’s a kaizo hack, it may be one of your few chances to see the gags outside of Youtube playthroughs.

5:50 PM – Kaizo Mario Galaxy: Oh sure let’s keep going with the brain-killing difficulty hacks. At least they’ll be playing it, and not me.

7:30 PM – Old School Runescape, Chambers of Xeric Solo: I know at least one person who’ll be excited to hear about this. Maybe you’ll be excited about it too?

Thursday, July 4th

3:07 AM – Monster Party: Why not kick off US Independence Day with this Japanese-made platformer parody of horror movie tropes?

10:53 AM – Pokemon White 2: Another of those crazy Pokemon runs, this one 3 1/2 hours long.

5:03 PM – Tetris: The Grand Master, Master Mode: Only fifteen minutes long, so set an alarm. This isn’t like the Gameboy or NES versions, the TGM games get fast quickly and only get faster. Soon they’ll be at “20G” and the pieces will effectively spawn in the bin, and the player will have to rely on lockdown delay to survive.

7:00 PM – Halo 3, 4 player Co-op on Legendary Difficulty: I include these as a nod to all the FPS fans out there.

8:43 PM – Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball: A sports game from the nearly-forgotten time before Electronic Arts locked down the rights to most professional sports under what seems to be a perpetual license. One of those seated at the couch for this one is Peanut Butter the Dog. An actual dog of course, not the Bojack Horseman character. It’d be hard for a cartoon character to sit on a physical couch.

10:07 PM – Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Reverse Boss Order: “Reverse Boss Order” means using various tricks to find and fight the bosses in the opposite order than as the developers intended. I don’t know how that works in a game where the second half is gated behind a mandatory boss fight. Maybe there’s a glitchy skip. We can find out what they mean by this together.

11:32 PM – Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix: There are people in this world who adore the KH games. Personally I find it fun to make up titles. Kingdom Hearts: Unfortunate Destiny Eternal! Kingdom Hearts: Thirty-two Squared Ultra Power! Kingdom Hears: The Wrath of Michael Eisner! Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days! Oops, that one’s real. Note this run is over 2 1/2 hours.3;

Friday, July 5th

2:32 AM – System Shock (Remake)

4:42 AM – Mr. Run and Jump: Hey, I did a Q&A with the creators last year! I wonder if they’ll call in during the run with a donation?

5:29 AM – The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, All Main Quests: We all must know by now that Morrowind can be completed in less than three minutes, right? This one pads it out to almost half an hour by requiring all the main quests to be finished.

6:07 AM – Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Ephraim Route: There’s nothing in the description saying there won’t be RNG manipulation, so expect this one to be exploitastic.

7:39 AM – Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, New Game+ Campaign Character Bid War: Except the memes to fly by faster than you can notice.

9:28 AM – Stardew Valley, Skull Caverns 100 Glitchless 4 Player: The Skull Caves are randomly generated, so this is like another roguelite hidden in the schedule.

10:48 – The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, All Dungeons (Swordless): One of those runs where you just want to see how they do it.

12:37 PM – The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Co-op Randomizer: Randomizers often make for interesting runs. The way co-op randomizers usually work is, there’s software running that watches both players playing a rom each randomized with the same seed, and when one of them finds an item, the other player is also awarded it.

3:37 PM – Super Mario Bros., Any%: Just six minutes are allocated for this one.

7:00 PM – Super Mario World, Kaizo Relay Race: Well frizz my hair and call me a toilet brush, it’s another kaizo Mario World hack. The two teams are the Groovy Goombas and the Funky Fuzzies. Expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

9:15 PM – Bonus Game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Defeat Ganon No SRM: SRM stands for “Stale Reference Manipulation.” It means that player frozenflygone won’t use a particularly glichy way to make the game, speaking technically, babble and foam at the mouth. They might use other gimmicks, but not that one.

9:55 PM – WACCA Reverse: Lately GDQ marathons have reserved a period of time for showing off someone utterly ruling at a Japanese arcade rhythm game, and that’s what this is this time.

11:36 PM – Grand Poo World 3: Another Mario World kaizo hack, made by a popular runner.

Saturday, July 6th

1:31 AM – Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Extreme NG+: Which one was this again?

6:47 AM – Hyperbolica: Another game where I interviewed its creator. I was hoping that their second game, the brilliant and mindwarping 4D Golf, would show up this time. Hyperbolica is brilliant and mindwarping too though. If you don’t know what it is yet, it’s an exploratory game set in a first-person perspective where you explore worlds that exist on a hyperbolic plane, a kind of non-Euclidian geometry. Parallel lines diverge at a distance! Regular pentagons have right-angled corners! Utter madness!

10:22 AM – Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire: Ah, a classic Sierra adventure game! I’m surprised that there are so few DOS games at GDQ overall.

12:01 PM – Kirby’s Adventure, No Major Glitches: There’s more NES games in the lineup than at past events, and this is a pretty terrific one.

2:07 PM – Pizza Tower, Any%, Noise, No Major Glitches: Pizza Tower is a recent indie success story, a rollicking game with art that looks like it came from a 90s cartoon like Rocko’s Modern Life, and with gameplay heavily inspired by Wario Land 4. “Noise” replaces main character Peppino with a different character with a different moveset, that makes traversing the same levels a different experience.

4:31 PM – Super Mario 64 Randomizer, 10 Star Blindfolded: Blindfolded runs have been highlighs of GDQ for several years now, but what will that mean to a randomized game?

5:26 PM – Baldur’s Gate 3, Honour Mode, Glitchless: Honour Mode means high difficulty and, if your party wipes, the game ends without recourse to saves (although games can still be continued outside of Honour Mode). Baldur’s Gate 3, along with Balatro, are the games of the hour, so a lot of you will want to tune in for it.

7:10 PM – Super Metroid, Race: Super Metroid race runs are a GDQ tradition. Whenever a donation says “kill the animals,” they aren’t expressing actual murderous intent, and when they say to save them it isn’t an additional expression of kindness. At the end of Super Metroid, during the escape sequence, there is a room that players can visit slightly off the main track that can allow them to let some creatures that aided them during the game to escape the decaying planet Zebes. There’s no game benefit to it, and skipping the room enables a player to finish the game maybe 30 seconds faster, but it’s a popular choice to save them anyway. In a race between two skilled players though, 30 seconds can easily cost them the victory, so they ask the viewers whether to save them or not, so both will be on equal footing in that regard.

8:10 PM – Bonus Game: Super Mario Maker 2: Nintendo seems to have abandoned the Mario Maker series, but it’s still a popular fixture at GDQ. I have qualms with how so many makers, and players, focus their efforts in constructing and completing hellishly difficult levels, but it’s true, they are popular. Bonus Games in the schedule are donation incentives, and are only played if targets are met, so this may not occur. Usually incentive targets are made in time, but not always.

9:15 PM – Elden Ring, Glitchless: Come see the popular soulslike get dissected like a frog on a workbench.

…and, at the end…

11:20 PM – Super Mario RPG Remake: this is listed as an RTA, or “Real Time Attack,” which I think is just their way of saying, they’re playing it through? But isn’t that just Any%? Anyway, it’s a new game that looks a lot like an old and popular one, you can see how far they’ve come along in destroying it since its release. I’m supposing that the remake of Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door will be in this slot come January.

Mattel’s Handheld Dungeons & Dragons LCD Game

This little pocket-sized unit was released in 1981, three years after the VCS/2600, but as the Gameboy proved years after, pocket-sized gaming can get away with less complex hardware than consoles. They called this their D&D “Computer Fantasy Game.”

Mattel made pretty good use of the D&D license. They also released the “Computer Labyrinth Game,” which was a mixture of physical and electronic components. This version is wholly electronic, and has the same kind of feel as a Game & Watch title. It has the old-style of LCD components, black shapes that are faintly visible at all times, but can be made much darker to “display” images.

This 13-minute unboxing and demonstration video is by Youtuber Nerd Mimic. If their gameplay description sounds a bit familiar, it seems that this game is mostly a handheld port of the older (yes, even from that time) computer game Hunt The Wumpus, which is played on what the math people call a graph of nodes. The idea is to use clues given by the game to deduce the location of a monster and to kill it by firing an arrow at it from an adjacent space. Stumbling into the space of the monster or a bottomless pit is lethal, and there are bats wandering around that can drop you into a random space. It’s a classic of early gaming, and a pretty good choice for a pocket-sized version.

Mattel made two console D&D games for the Intellivision, both of them interesting and thought of well today: Cloudy Mountain and Treasure of Tarmin. None of these games made use of the true AD&D ruleset, as it would have been called at the time. They’re original game designs with a vague sort of fantasy theme, but they’re still interesting to play.

Displaced Gamers on Mega Man 3 Glitches

A bit of scanline flickering is a fairly common problem on the NES. Even Super Mario Bros. 3 had it, and that game was made by Nintendo themselves.

Game graphics in the 8- and 16-bit ages often came down to tricky hardware manipulation. The art of doing raster effects, changing the registers in the video hardware so as to divide the screen into different sections, ultimately comes down to timing. On the Atari VCS/2600, nearly all the graphics had to be done that way, but it was still a useful technique for over a decade after that.

A lot depends on the specifics of the video chip, a custom-built piece of silicon developed for the express purpose of taking graphics defined in memory and folding it, like electronic origami, into a shape that the TV would perceive as a broadcast signal. At that time, while it might still have been possible with clever coding, CPUs weren’t nearly fast enough to do that job themselves and still produce acceptable graphic quality and run game logic. (If you want to see what it would be like, I refer readers interested in doing it the very hard way to the amazing Freespin demo, which runs on a 1541 disk drive, and no video hardware at all.)

Older NES games used a supported bit of hackery called the “Sprite 0 Hit,” a signal the PPU would send at the moment the first of the system’s 64 sprites began to be drawn. By watching for it, games could do rudimentary raster effects on a system not designed for them. The issue there was processor time: the Sprite 0 Hit feature wasn’t hooked up to an interrupt line, so the program had to continually watch for it, checking a memory location repetitively over and over until it changed. Some games spent large portions of their runtime in a tight loop checking for the Sprite 0 Hit. Since, from the program’s perspective, the signal might come at any time, the loop needed to be tight, meaning the game couldn’t spend that time doing other work or else it might be delayed in responding to the extremely time-sensitive signal.

The MMC3 mapper had a special function though that could time out when a programmable scanline was reached, and send the processor an interrupt request at that time, greatly freeing up the processor for doing other things with that time. But not all programmers understood the best way to use it, which is why Mega Man 3 has some scanline glitching in a couple of very visible places, in the pause window and on the level select screen.

Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series, which we’ve linked to multiple times in the past, has done an exposé looking into how Mega Man III’s glitches happen (28 minutes), and even wrote some code that erases all trace of them. As usual for Behind the Code, the explanation is fairly technical, especially of the fix, but the first half of it is fairly comprehensible. No one says you have to watch the whole thing. Or, indeed, any of it, but I always enjoy them!

Computing Pi on a NES

Today’s link is to a madperson who explains how to compute digits of pi on a NES’s 6502 to an arbitrary length. As you do. Along the way it explains how to multiply and divide in binary on a processor without hardware support. It’s around nine minutes long, but if you want a machine to get to the end of pi it’ll probably take a tad bit longer.

We link to such a variety of things here. Sometimes we post light videos where someone has Kirby do funny things. Sometimes we show explainers that explain how to do arithmetic on old processors. I presume that you’ll take from these what you want, and leave the rest to the crazy people, by definition the people who are not you. I understand.

What I’m Working On: Dungeon DX

A few weeks back I mentioned Dungeon, a Commodore 64 CRPG system created by David Caruso II and published in 1990 on the disk magazine Loadstar. We’ve made it available through emulation on itch.io for $5. It’s here, and it’s awesome. It’s not just a way to play CRPG adventures but to make them yourself, and it even contains a random dungeon creation feature.

Dungeon’s map editor

I make it available with some trepidation. Dungeon has a few significant bugs. For example, it supports two disk drives throughout, but if you use its Dungeon Maker then you need to set it for single drive mode, or else you’ll encounter a Disk Error just at the worst possible time: when saving your project. Its randomized “Lost Worlds” often create dungeons that strand your character in impossible situations, and while there is a way out of them, it involves loading the Guild menu 15 times.

But I’ve played a lot of these random dungeons, and I think overall David Caruso II made a clever little game system, and I think his ideas are worth building upon. That’s why I’m working on a remake/update of Dungeon, that I’m calling Dungeon DX.

I’m making it in Python using the Pygame library. I’ve tried making a game with Pygame before and had some problems with it (I may bring myself to talk about that experience someday), but using it now I’m pleased to see Pygame 2 has become a lot more performant, and that’s even before trying to compile it into a faster form. I’ve built for Dungeon DX a kind of bespoke terminal emulator, but one with support for loads of cool graphics effects. I’ve made dungeon art and monster images for it using the website Fontstruct, which gives the images a low-tech, but distinctive look.

A collection of monsters, in font form, still being worked on. They’re reminiscent of the monster silhouettes from early editions of Call of Cthulhu!

I’ve been working very hard on it, to the extent that I can feel myself getting my hopes up that a substantial number of people may actually play and enjoy it. Most of the times in the past that I’ve done that I’ve had those hopes get crushed, but hey, maybe the nth+1 time’s the charm?

Besides not having all of its bugs, why do I think this project is worth working on? These are the things I find appealing about the original Dungeon, the reasons that I played so much of it myself, things that I don’t generally see in CRPGs these days:

  • It’s not a game but a game system. It isn’t a single huge campaign that you play and finish, and it isn’t a single story. Your characters can keep going so long as there are adventures to be had.
  • In structure it isn’t like a novel, but it’s more like a series of short stories. Each dungeon is a single screen, that fills out as your character explores it. That may sound a bit like a classic roguelike, and there are some elements of that, but the feel is subtly different. Each single-screen dungeon usually has more adventure packed into it than in a single roguelike dungeon level.
  • It’s like a collection of short stories, but that stars your character as they progress through it. The focus is more on the development of that character as they continue their adventuring career. Like how the Conan the Barbarian novellas are each an episode in the life of a single adventurer.
  • It features what’s known in some circles as slow character growth. D&D has rapid growth, and it’s gotten even faster as the system has changed through the years. 5th Edition characters advance to second level absurdly quickly, after earning only 300 XP, and that advancement practically doubles their power! 0th-level Dungeon characters (it starts counting at 0) have a lot more durability, but it takes them more time to advance to Level 1, and when they gain it their power only increases a little. In this, a lot more of a Dungeon character’s life is decided at character creation. But it also means, as they increase in power, you know it’s due to your own efforts.
  • It’s more simulationist that CRPGs have become as of late. A lot of CRPGs have crept towards gamishness, which generally is okay, I mean they are games after all. But I think RPGs work the best when you can imagine them as being the adventures of real people, so as their power has crept up, and their abilities have gotten more abstract and arbitrary, they have come to feel more and more like playing pieces than living people.
  • While there’s a random dungeon maker, you can also make your own adventures for it, and give them to other people! That’s potentially a very great thing. It reminds me of EAMON, an 80s CRPG game system that people could create their own adventures for. (There are still websites devoted to EAMON! It’s a rabbit hole worth exploring, but that’s something more suited for its own post.)
  • And finally, it’s hard. Characters die frequently. You can revive them up to three times, and if you don’t mind reloading the guild menu 15 times you can turn the game off to preserve their life, but defeat is frequent without very careful play. You often have to play like a scavenger: take what easy-to-find rewards and successes you can, build your power over time, seek out easy adventures, and don’t take unnecessary risks. Dungeon characters are not heroes, not at first anyway, and if they’re ever to become heroes you’ll have to watch their steps.
The current appearance of the new Dungeon Maker module

Because these are the aspects of Dungeon that I like, they’re the elements that I’m focusing on in making Dungeon DX. My plans aren’t to make it quite as hard, but to still emphasize that these people are not demigods, not yet. A character’s career may be the story of the creation of a demigod, like how Conan, through countless trials, eventually became king of a great nation. It’s kind of a lie that people who rise to greatness frequently do so because of their own efforts, but it’s a pleasing lie, and it makes for a fun saga if you don’t take it too seriously.

My other plans for Dungeon DX, which may change, for while progress has been rapid (because Python is awesome), I’m still iterating over lots of things:

  • A retro look, kind of akin to how Dungeon looks on a C64, but still with enhancements. It doesn’t use pixel art, instead using vector graphics created in Fontstruct.
  • Dungeon was all one-on-one fights. Dungeon DX should have parties of three characters, fighting enemy groups that can be larger than that.
  • Dungeon doesn’t let characters keep items between adventures. For the most part, characters only advance through gaining experience. DX should let characters have a persistent inventory.
  • Dungeon doesn’t have any money system at all! DX should both have money and a shop where basic necessities and equipment can be obtained.
  • Dungeon doesn’t simulate much of the basis of exploration. My ideas for DX let characters rest in the dungeon, for example, but they must consume food to do so.
  • Dungeon has very little graphical splendor. Dungeons themselves are just blocks of green, with black tunnels dug through it, and once in a while a graphic character. That has to change.
  • Dungeon’s encounter model isn’t scriptable at all, which limits what can be done. It’s a lot more flexible than you might think it would be, given the C64’s memory limitations, but the edges of what’s possible are still easily reached. I want to change that.
  • Dungeon’s magic system is very interesting for its own sake, a collection of 16 spells that are more useful outside of battle than in it. Only one of those spells that does direct damage to enemies! Magic is much more of general utility. While my design has more damage-doing magic than that, I want to keep that feeling that magic is not primarily for harming monsters.
  • Dungeon doesn’t let characters learn spells themselves: all magic comes from items that contain it, and depletes with use. There’s interesting things about that system, but it kind of means that high-Intelligence characters aren’t very viable if the dungeon constructor doesn’t give them any magic to use early on.

Dan Olson Discusses James Rolfe

Dan Olson is the brilliant documentarian behind Folding Ideas. He’s covered a range of interesting topics ranging from Decentraland, gamer culture, NFTs, financial scammers and Minecraft.

James Rolfe plays the Angry Video Game Nerd, that long-running game commentary and comedy series, and to some degree he is the nerd, even though the character doesn’t reflect his own views or personality. Although he plays a character, playing it has become his career. He does other videos too, but it’s what he’s known for, it’s his mark upon the world, and so it’s how he’ll be remembered.

Rolfe is the head of a little empire called Cinemassacre. Rolfe was really popular at one point, but over time his subject became less relevant. Time is unkind. By the time the mechanisms became available to effectively monetize what he does, his fandom had diminished, although he keeps plugging away, and it sustains him. Cinemassacre partnered with an outfit, Screenwave, to help him monetize it, which involves making five videos a week. It’s provided him with an income to support a family. That’s the same tradeoff most of us make, only he gets to do something he likes doing.

Dan Olson did a video on James Rolfe (1h 17m). Here, I’ll embed it:

It makes the case that James Rolfe was a victim of his own success. The Nerd character was extremely popular for a while. If you have three things you do, and one of them turns out a popular as the Nerd was, you’re naturally going to focus on that, and the others must suffer.

Dan Olson’s video is not against James Rolfe, but it’s also not in favor of him. It presents him as a hack, a jobber, a person who, when he finally has the chance to do something with his own ideas, they end up half-baked, iterations over things he made as a teenager. These things are probably true, but they’re also better than what most of the rest of us get.

I have never really been a fan of the Nerd. I think that the relentless negativity has fed into a culture that tears things down. But there is effort in how they’re made. There is a weird skill in coming up with so many distinct ways to insult things. I don’t agree with all his videos, which don’t leave much room to consider things noble attempts or failed experiments. But they’re just games, after all.

James Rolfe isn’t a bad person, far from it. Even so, Olson’s video tells us that Rolfe has an anti-fandom, a band of people who just hate him and what he does for no reason, for the crime of having a family and doing what he needs to survive. What an awful thing to exist. To think that there’s a category of person so petty. But also, this kind of pettiness is a great invisible sea. It is one of the worst of the early internet’s many legacies, and it’s largely the result of most people having no real, I’m not going to say life, but I will say stakes in life. When people’s lives are devoid of real meaning, they find what little meaning they can, and sad to say, there’s a lot of people who, to put it in Balatro terms, the best card they’ve been given is a five of clubs, and the rest of their deck is mostly twos and threes. (Can you tell what I’ve just came from doing?)

I’m rambling a bit, and part of that is due to the fact that Olson’s video rambles too. Dan Olson became obsessed with James Rolfe and his legacy, due in part to the similarity between their lives, and it feels like the video was released partly to exorcise James Rolfe from Olson’s mind.

I hope that Olson has successfully evicted the nerd from his brain attic. And I hope that Rolfe continues to be successful, even if I won’t watch his videos. It’s a hard life for all of us, far too hard to spend it tearing others down.

Twinbeard Completes Bowser’s Fury One Shine At A Time

Twinbeard is a pretty active gamedev and Youtuber. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he made Frog Fractions and Frog Fractions II. Yes! Him.

Lately he’s been playing Mario games on the installment plan: one significant unit of the game per video. One level at a time, or one star, or shine, or whatever luminous MacGuffin the plumber is lusting after at the moment.

He just wrapped up Bowser’s Fury in 105 videos: 100 shines, plus some extra things like boss fights. Some of the videos go by really quickly; some do not.

If this sounds familiar, before we linked to Twinbeard playing through Super Mario Galaxy in a similar manner. Now that he’s finished helping Bowser though his emotional issues, he’s off on another game, this time with a different angle. He’s playing through a romhack of Super Mario World, but with each level remade from memory of various different people. It might also be worth looking into!

Twinbeard Plays Bowser’s Fury (Youtube playlist, 105 videos)