I’m opening this post with a special message to any anthropomorphic animal video game characters who happen to be reading this. As we will see, they rate this special prologue quite highly, and so it will make us very popular to any Dottys or Apollos in our audience, being exactly the sort of thing they want to hear. In the secret, inner language of their minds, I’m sure it confirms all their biases and makes them feel good about themselves:
Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series has a lot of weird systems in them. Some games wear the grass down according to character walking patterns; all the games have the “Stalk Market,” a risky way to make a lot of money; most of the games have a lost-and-found; and so on.
A system that was in the first game, and I’m not sure was ever adapted for later games (but then it might have been) was letter-writing, not just to other players in the same village, but to the villagers. They’d save the letters you wrote them and show them off to other players if they moved to another town, and even write you back. Of course, parsing and intelligently responding to any text, no matter the language, was beyond computers of the time (and despite what AI enthusiasts will tell you, still isn’t), so the game has to fake it in some way. But, how?
Well, what is the purpose of writing letters to characters in the game? It gives villagers something interesting to show people when they move to their villages, and, it’s a roleplaying exercise for the writer, a way to pretend the animal denizens of your town are real people and not simulated game mechanics present to make the game seem less empty.
Both of these design goals work best if the person writing the letter actually writes real letters, and not random jumbles of characters, so Animal Crossing has a mechanism to reward players for writing what appear to be real letters, and not placeholder gibberish, and its system of ranking text to attempt to reward actual letter-like writing is quite complex. It looks for punctuation that looks generally appropriate, capital letters after sentence-ending punctuation, triples of characters that commonly appear in English, and sequences of characters followed by spaces that approximate the word lengths of English. Of special interest: these are elements that have to be tweaked by language, and so they pose a special challenge to localization.
Hunter R., popular Animal Crossing Youtuber, released a video that explains exactly how GC Animal Crossing scores letters written to villagers. As it turns out, the text that scores the very best looks a lot like that in the preamble to this post, up above. Go figure! Here is his description (10 minutes):
EDIT: My mistake! Originally the villager-friendly message near the beginning of this post was missing a trailing period, which would cost it some points when brought under the exacting animal eye. It has been corrected.
Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven games are still a bit obscure, but have a passionate fanbase. They share design sensibilities with the WarioWare series, which is because both share a character designer, Ko Takeuchi. They both have a distinctive clean-line look, and a similar sense of humor.
About four years ago, some of those fans made one of those reanimation compilations of the series, and the fruits of their labor is unusually keeping in spirit of the original, which itself samples many different art and musical styles. The reanimation feels like it could have been one of the remixes from the games itself.
Speaking of, the reanimation covers all of the remixes, of all of the games in the series, with the result that the full sequence is eighteen minutes long! It’s quite faithful to the originals, despite the vastly different animation styles, and it even scored an appreciative comment from Takeuchi himself! Here it is, but be warned: you’ll watch it for a while, then see one of the videos mention it’s only half over, and you’ll think to yourself, no way:
An aside, a different reanimation project near to my heart, but unrelated to video games, is the highly-memeable 2004 collaboration that animated They Might Be Giants’ Fingertips (6 minutes, original page). Note, in its original Flash incarnation, different elements would be selected on every play, an aspect that is unfortunately lost in these renderings.
The original Legend of Zelda, unique in the series, not only has keys that can be used in any dungeon, but you can even buy keys, for considerable expense, in shops, for either 80 or 100 rupees.
But, is the purchase of keys ever necessary? Usually Zelda 1 gives you many more keys than you need. Even in the Second Quest, which tightens the screws, you can usually get by if you just make sure to clear every room and bomb some walls.
But consider the worst-case scenario. What if you open just the wrong doors? Is it possible, if you waste keys on rooms that aren’t on the critical path to completing the game, to make it so you have to resort to buying keys in shops?
In an 11-minute video, “TheRetroDude,” as he styles himself, examines this question. tl;dw: not in the First Quest, but it’s technically possible to soft-lock yourself, unless you resort to commercially-provided keys, in the Second Quest, if you’re very injudicious about the doors you open. Here:
Before Mario is a Blogspot blog (remember them?) devoted to Nintendo’s company history before they made video games. Well, their December 13th post doesn’t fit that bill entirely, since the museum is quite new, but they did focus on those aspects on display that don’t deal with their freakishly popular electronic products.
Nintendo got their start making playing cards (images from Before Mario)Er, so we’re consuming Kirby’s plastic bottled regurgitation?
I found out about this program that runs in the background and plays time- and season-appropriate Animal Crossing music. It’s free, there’s versions for Windows and Mac on the site, and I found a copy on the Arch depository so there’s obviously a version for Linux too. It even has a rain option.
Pretty simple today, but it’s free and fun and free. It’s freeee!
How long has it been since you thought of TF2? I played it a bit, enjoyed it for a while, but in the end FPSes aren’t really my thing. Guns and shooting people, realistically, even in a heavily stylized and humorous way, not for me. But I can respect all the work that went into it, and it’s a landmark of both gaming and gaming culture.
Team Fortress 2 has an official comic that lays out the story of the game, such as it is. It had six issues, then it just trailed off in 2017. Well, they finally made one more, to wrap it up. The game’s not done yet no, people will probably be playing Team Fortress 2 until the world collapses, and the stories of those many games are the real saga of TF2. But there is a backstory to all those stories, and it’s told in those comics.
At the end it even has a holiday theme. Seven years later, Soldier breaks Merasmus out of prison, and then tells him the true story of why The Administrator has BLU and RED fight each other. Well, kind of. Then the Korean mafia gets involved. Merasmus dies, but comes right back as a ghost, because he’s Merasmus. Other things happen.
Then we go to Scout’s house for Smissmas. Find out what happens next yourself, but I will give you the panel near the end with all the mercs together. Because it’s Smissmas Eve, and a fitting coda to the entire Team Fortress 2 thing.
Look at all the Sandviches! But, uh… which one is Pyro? Is that a delicate question?
By the way, if you choose to download that CBR it’s a doozy, it’s over three-quarters of a gigabyte because the images are all saved as PNGs.
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
It’s another ancient gaming site that, despite domain names and hosting being persistent charges that must be paid month after month until the site goes down, and not even being updated since the turn of the century, is somehow still on-line, due to the good graces, sheer orneriness, or forgotten bank withdrawals of the owner.
This time it’s this gaming emulation site, a subsite of cnspace.net by Ben Martin. Of all the pages linked from the main site, the game one is the only one with a broken link. The game link is the only one of them that goes to a subdomain, which never got fixed when the site structure was changed on February 13, 1999. Since they never repaired the front page link the site’s reach may be reduced, but considering the main page proudly lists a last update of only a couple of months later, I presume whoever is keeping the lights on doesn’t care much of reach.
From their page on Atari 2600 games.
Why do I point sites like this out? For one thing, there’s still some good info there. There’s a short essay on emulation in general, although I note that practically every hyperlink in it is dead or to a parked domain. The main site has pages on fractals, and some bespoke software for folk still running Windows 95 or 98. The philosophy, math and books pages are nearly empty. There’s a page of tributes to old games, with a guide to the Commodore 64 version of California Games.
A portion of their review of Impossible Mission. They seem to have had a fondness for Epyx titles. Good taste!
Where has the time gone? Don’t answer, I already know. There used to be thousands of pages like this. Nowadays, who can even find the few survivors? Google will do everything in its power to direct you to Youtube or Reddit instead of this place. Speaking practically, it won’t be a huge informational loss when they finally stop paying the bills, but it will be one more victory for the forces of entropy that tear away at everything in our world.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Who, among everyone on the internet, is just finding out about the release of Episode 4 of the breakout Youtube hit The Amazing Digital Circus here? It’s already up to 44 million views.
I’ll embed it here, but before we get to that it’s worth noting how it got to this place. Its creator Gooseworx made a number of items before it, including one linked to directly from these halls, Little Runmo. A few other representative Worx from the Goose are The Darly Boxman Show, The Ghost of the Year Award and Elain the Bounty Hunter.
Not too long ago Gooseworx joined up with Glitch Productions, a small outfit that hither-then had been known mostly for machinima based on Super Mario 64. Soon after they released the extremely popular show Murder Drones, but it was tADC that really caused them to blow up.
Now, tADC is released on Netflix around the same time it debuts on Youtube. I hope they didn’t have to sign some kind of demonic contract to do that; some folk have been treated badly by the Netflix regime. But the show is still on Youtube and can be watched there, if you can put up with their horrendous advertising scheme, that is.
Several characters show heretofore unseen sides of their personalities in this one. Up until now Gangle has only been a bit character; usually-helpful Ragatha spends most of the episode in a Stupid Sauce stupor; and Jax, under the prospect of punishment, doesn’t get to be nearly as entertainingly belligerent as in the past. It also sees the return of Gummigoo, but is it really the same person as Pomni remembers?
Gooseworx has a Tumblr, which is full of hints about the show and the direction it may take. One piece of information revealed there is that The Amazing Digital Circus is planned to be a limited series, with a total of nine episodes, although with some possible short detours along the way. The show has turned out to be popular in Japan, and there’s a manga adaptation of it being web-published. I’ll leave it to you to find links to that (there’s fan translations out there too), but one fun page from it, from the issue-end artist created content, is this festive/creepy Abstracted Kaufmo christmas tree!
Kimimi the Game-Eating She-Monster recently covered Moero Twinbee, known in the US as Stinger in one of Konami’s few attempts to establish their cute-em-up series in foreign territories. I think Twinbee is a terrific name for a game of this type, so it puzzles me why they insist on renaming it. In addition to “Stinger,” in Europe they retitled the arcade game Detana! Twinbee to Bells & Whistles, where the bells may fit but the whistles sure don’t.
(A warning if you play this one and are sensitive to flashing images, there is a violently flashing effect right before the bosses that won’t treat you very well, I’m afraid.)
Here it is. The first NES game I ever beat.
Her article is ostensibly the subject of this post, and I’ll try not to repeat points that she makes. Stinger holds a place in my heart, if not a prominent one then still one at all, after all it has blood to pump. It was the first NES game I ever beat! If memory holds correctly the second one was The Legend of Zelda, which is kind of fitting: Stinger is easier than it looks, so it builds confidence, while Zelda is harder. (It took me months, mostly from being stuck finding the entrance to Level 7 in the Second Quest.)
Pay no mind to the glitch at the top of the screen, being in the NES’ “overscan area” it’s usually not visible when played on a real TV.
In Japan, Moero Twinbee was not only a Famicom Disk System game but one that supported up to three players (P3 used a controller plugged into the expansion port). The US ROM version only allows two players, which realistically probably makes for a better game anyway. Even with a single player, once you get the five-way shot powerup it’s easy to fill the screen with so many bullets that you don’t actually see many enemies.
Stinger has really fun bosses! The manual says this character is “Willie the Watermelon-Head,” but she’s obviously presenting as a girl, and the watermelon’s not her head, it’s her whole body!
Kimimi recounts much of what makes Moero Twinbee/Stinger different both from other shoot-em-ups and from other Twinbee games: the bell powerup system that’s Twinbee’s trademark, and the side-scrolling stages that are unique in its series. The side-view levels are particularly interesting, not only because the game both begins and ends with one, but because it completely changes the gameplay in a couple of significant ways.
You see Twinbee is a variation upon the theme of Namco’s Xevious, complete with its bomb button to attack ground-based installations, and that depends on its overhead perspective. But Moero’s side-scrolling levels ditch it completely: in those, and only those, the Bees fire arcing bombs along with their main shots, with the same button, and it’s those that can hit ground targets at the bottom of the screen. The bomb button is repurposed to fire hearts, a different special weapon that only works on bells.
One of the vertical-scroll, overhead-view stages, using the classic Xevious-style bombs. BTW, don’t pick up the L or R powerups, they give you a side-shot but, like the Double in many Gradius games, it comes at the expense of half of your forward shots. They’ll just get you killed, and other than by dying there’s no way to get rid of one if you pick it up!
Oh those bells, them and all their tintinnabulations. If you’ve never played Twinbee, but have played one of the Cotton games, you already know how they work. Some targets (usually clouds in the Twinbee games) release colored powerup objects. They rapidly fall down towards the bottom of the screen, but they can be kept in play by shooting them, bouncing them up. As you shoot them, every few hits it changes color, and different colored bells award different powerups. I like powerup systems like this and the Gradius system, and consider them superior to the standard icon-based setup from Salamander and practically every other shmup. You get to decide which powerups you want, possibly to activate them just when you need them, but you still have to use skill and judgement to get the ones you need when you need them, whereas games with set powerup locations force you to choose between what you have and what you’re given.
This is the boss of Stage 3. Believe it or don’t, this murderous spigot is called Fang.
Hearts get fired from your ship upward in the side-view stages. It’s a lot harder to hit bells when they’re falling vertically past your horizontally-moving shots, instead of when both bells and bullets move vertically, and the hearts are meant to make up for that, but they’re so useless that it’s a much better strategy, in practice, to just get up close and pepper them with shots up close. The best powerup is the force field, which grants you several free hits (and doesn’t summon the wave of shield-weakening egg enemies from the first game), but it’s also the one that takes the most bell hits to earn. Another thing to aim for is just collecting the default yellow bells, which award no powerups, but every one you collect without letting a bell fall off-screen rapidly earns you more points, up to 10,000 points each after collecting just four yellow bell in a row. It only requires 100,000 points for an extra life, then additionals every 200,000, up to about 900,000 or so. 10,000 points per bell is such a huge bonus that, once you’re good with your powerup state, gigantic scores aren’t too hard to reach, and there’s three extra lives right in the first stage anyway.
This is Stage 6, the next-to-last. The final level is entirely in space so it’s not that interesting to look at. Get that Star! It’s the only five-way shot in the game!
The Twinbee games have always had interesting bosses, which helps to distract from the fact that, up to Detana! (the fourth Twinbee game, and the second in the arcade) most of the other targets are just popcorn enemies. When you just get started playing Moero Twinbee, it’s not uncommon to rule through the game with 3- or 5-way shot, the best powerups you can get from the ground targets, then get demolished by a boss you don’t yet know how to beat and then, reduced to single shots, either have your game end right there, or barely get in the last few shots against the boss and then get inundated by the popcorn enemies in the next level.
The first bell powerup in the sequence, blue, is Speed-Up, and unlike Gradius where too much speed will kill you extra dead, it’s mostly beneficial in Stinger, because you can’t crash into the terrain and you’ll probably have a force field anyway. With at least 3-Way shot, a couple of Speedups and the force field, the only real danger is the harder bosses and your force field running out. The blue-white flashing force field bells don’t appear if you already have one, and you’ll probably run out in the middle of Stage 6, where the game finally rolls up its sleeves and gets to punching. If you can then somehow build up another blue-white bell (it takes exactly 25 hits on a bell to make one), you have a chance at finishing the game. Like many Konami games at the time, Stinger continues indefinitely, loop after loop, and it gets slightly harder each time.
I forget what this boss is called, but it’s especially notable for being a lite version of classic Salamander boss Tetran, a.k.a. Intruder
Konami made three Twinbee games for the NES; the first was a remake of the arcade original; this was the second; and the third, Poko Poko Daimaou, I think is inferior. They form a trilogy; then for the fourth game, Detana! Twinbee, it was rebooted, keeping the Bees’ creator Professor Cinnamon but bequeathing them to his grandnephew, grandson and granddaughter Light, Mint and Pastel, whose popularity would soon outstrip the originals, especially Pastel who became quite a phenomenon. Detana was followed up by Pop’n Twinbee and Rainbow Bell Adventures on Super Famicom, Twinbee Yahho in arcades, and a handful of anime OAVs.
Pastel: early crush of many a Japanese kid, and her ship Winbee. I emphasize, Pastel is not in this game, although Winbee is Player 2.
Ms. Pac-Man. Currently on the outs with Pac-Man rights-owner Bandai-Namco because its origins weren’t with them, and its developer GCC licensed the rights to another party than them, which has given us such travesties as “Pac-Mom.” Which is a shame, because in general Ms. Pac-Man is a better game than Pac-Man. Its four mazes don’t have the nuance that Pac-Man’s does (there’s no one-way routes, for instance), it doesn’t have scatter periods to give the player a breather during each board, and after board #7 its fruit, and the score award for chasing it down, is random, taking an important measure of skill and just throwing it up in the air and shrugging.
But it does have multiple mazes. And its Red and Pink ghosts behave randomly for the first bit of each board (here’s a prior post about that), eliminating the major design flaw of Pac-Man: its vulnerability to patterns. Pac-Man is certainly not the only game to lack substantive randomness, but the nature of its maze-based play is that it’s relatively easy to perform them. So long as you hold in the direction you need to go at least five frames before you reach an intersection, you can be sure that you’re performing a pattern perfectly, making Pac-Man into an endurance game more than anything. Ms. Pac-Man doesn’t have that problem.
But that doesn’t mean that Ms. Pac-Man can’t be mastered, and the basis of that is through a technique called grouping. Grouping can be done in Pac-Man too, but if you know some good patterns it isn’t necessary. But in Ms. Pac-Man it’s a key skill, both to make sure you eat as many ghosts as possible in the early and mid boards, and for general survival, for a bunch of ghosts in one lump is much easier to avoid than a scattered mess of four separate ghosts.
The basic idea is to understand the ways to move in the maze so that pursuing ghosts take slightly different routes to reach you, so that leading ghosts are delayed just a bit, or trailing ghosts approach you slightly faster.
This time I’m going to leave the explanation to the video, but it’s interesting to think about, and to see if you can apply this information yourself.
