Along the lines of our link to Chris Person’s Surviving Forums post on Aftermath, here’s another post that’s only tangentially related to gaming, but is very relevant to there being more things to post about later. It’s Blake Watson’s free web book about making your own web pages and sites! I also posted it to Metafilter, where people seem to like it very much!
I feel like it’s another instance of what ajroach42, the founder of New Ellijay TV, describes as planning for scalability resulting on making doing basic things too hard to do. Web site construction gets mired in a maze of components and frameworks, that purport to make it easier, but static sites are really easy enough to make without them. There’s really not a lot you have to learn to make a basic website, or even a complex one, if it doesn’t need a lot of interactivity. And that also makes your site much more future proof!
Websites made in 1991 are still as readable today as they were when they were first made. But sites made with Java, or Flash? Flash needs Ruffle, and the result is buggy, and Java is completely gone now. How will React.js fare in 30 years? What if you don’t keep your libraries updated to reflect changing Javascript execution engines?
It’s too late to inform you of preorders, those ended yesterday, but Jeremy Parish, whose Video Works series is, along with Chrontendo and Atari Archive, among the best and most informative video game history series on Youtube, and the whole internet, is preparing to sell The NES Era Vol. I, a book that’s as complete a picture of the early 3rd generation video game world in Japan as has ever written. If you’ve been following the channel you’ve seen reviews of strange and obscure games have hardly ever been heard off outside of jolly old Nippon.
This promo compilation presents a good selection of the games covered both on his channel and his upcoming book (2 1/2 minutes):
It is true that publisher Limited Run Games has a book in the works from me about Mystery Dungeon, but I’d be posing this here regardless. It’s an important work, and if it’s as fun as the video series then it’s an essential purchase when it comes out. It’s made of candy!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A scene from the career of Phoenix Wright: an encounter with the brilliant, although linguistically-challenged, Franziska Von Karma. It’s from Mornal, and voiced, and Franziska animated, by Paula Peroff. One minute.
I haven’t posted much from Kirby and Smash Bros. creator’s prolific Youtube channel on game development. There’s a lot of good information in there. The channel is winding down now after a good run, but now, near the end, he’s posted at one of his final videos a remembrance of his old boss, and beloved Nintendo company president, the late Satoru Iwata. (10 minutes)
It’s now been nearly 10 years since Iwata’s passing, and the outpouring of respect, admiration, and even affection, for him over that time has been remarkable. There’s a sense that we lost an amazing figure. Sakurai is brilliant in many ways, but he calls Iwata the smartest man he’s ever known. He strove to be polite, not to take offense in conflict, and to always act with logic instead of emotion. He helped transition Nintendo from being under the sole control of the Yamaguchi family to the more varied and ingenious company they’re known for being today.
In addition to running the company, Mr. Iwata started out as a programmer a HAL Laboratory. Think of how rare that is for a multi-billion-dollar company. They didn’t hire your standard MBA out off a business school, but put their future in the hands of a former coder. I have no illusions that, in many cases, that could have been disastrous, because programming and management require different skill sets, but Mr. Iwata pulled it off.
Sakurai finishes the video with a story of the last time he saw Iwata alive. He calls Iwata the person in the world who understood him the most. When Iwata wanted to see him, he didn’t delegate it to an assistant but always emailed him directly. It seems that Iwata was a good person who many admired and respected, but to Masahiro Sakurai, he meant something more.
The video isn’t very long, and there’s a sense of finality to it, not just in Sakurai’s memories of Iwata, but of the ending of his Youtube channel. Masahirro Sakurai on Creating Games is such an unusual series: an important and brilliant working game creator telling the world personally of his views as a creator. Such an unusual move! But Iwata created both the Iwata Asks series, and the Nintendo Direct promotional videos, which may have inspired Sakurai’s own series. Both men understand the importance, often neglected I think, of clear communication, both between others and the world.
Thank you, Mr. Sakurai, for what you’ve told us. And thank you, Mr. Iwata, for all your hard work.
Another Nintendo post. The company’s tight-lippedness, which has intensified since the days of Iwata Asks, lends itself to fan speculation about nearly everything, and part of that everything is whatever happened to Peach’s minister, Toadsworth. In Japanese he’s キノじい, Kinojii, which I think implies he’s second in rank behind Peach in the Mushroom Kingdom hierarchy. Or was.
Toadsworth was introduced as a third in the vacation party, with Mario and Peach, in Super Mario Sunshine, likely as a kind of chaperone to make sure it wasn’t Peach and Mario taking a personal trip together, which I’m sure would have been a scandal in the fungal broadsheets, their ruler traveling alone with a swarthy Italian. The kooparazzi would be all over it.
Throughout the Gamecube era, Toadsworth was a prominent element of Mario lore, racking up appearances in many games. He was in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario Kart DoubleDash, several Mario sports, and especially in the Mario & Luigi games, which fleshed out the character more than any other source.
Piantapedia on Youtube made an 11-minute video exploring Toadsworth’s history. It contains the information that Toadsworth was explicitly removed from the Super Mario Bros. Movie, replaced with a character known as Toad General, which is as good a sign as any that Nintendo is purposely not providing the character any more exposure, except perhaps in remakes like the one of Thousand-Year Door.
Isn’t it odd? Nintendo, when given opportunities to expand upon Mario lore, whenever they take a strong stab at it, often walks it back to the baseline of the original Super Mario Bros. They seem reluctant to meaningfully develop the Mario universe. Sometimes this happens in immediately consecutive games: remember how Super Mario Galaxy 2 abandoned nearly everything from the first Super Mario Galaxy, pretending it didn’t exist, when presenting its story?
The fact that TYD wasn’t rewritten to remove Toadsworth indicates the character isn’t poisonous to Nintendo, necessarily, but neither do they seem interested in giving him any more exposure. For shame! Who knows what Peach and Mario might get up to behind closed doors without Kinojii to watch over things?
The MSX standard was something devised by Microsoft, a specification for a Z80-powered 8-bit microcomputer for the home market. In the style of CP/M machines, and later PC compatibles, any company could make their own MSX machine, and in Japan over 20 different companies did, along with succeeding standards like the MSX2 and MSX+. It made a bit of headway in Europe too, though not nearly as much. The US space had already been taken up by the Apple II line, the Atari 8-bit machines, and especially the Commodore 64. It causes me to wonder, if Jack Tramiel hadn’t made the C64 so inexpensive, selling for around $200 for most of its life, then the MSX could have easily come over here and become a thing.
Note that, despite the friendly play button circle, this is not an embed. Clicking on the image will take you off-site.
Information on the MSX and the wealth of games for it has become better known in the West in more recent years. Konami, especially, backed MSX machines heavily, and a number of games like Castlevania, Gradius and The Goonies had MSX versions, which often had substantial differences from their Famicom cousins.
Today’s find is a 54-minute video on the MSX’s history and legacy by re:enthused. It isn’t on Youtube this time though! This time it’s hosted on the Peertube instance fedi.video. So you won’t have to worry about ads this time. Still though, nearly an hour. There’s a lot of interesting information in there!
Peertube embedding doesn’t seem very viable in WordPress, so I’m going to scrreenshot the thumbnail and link it to the page. Here:
Chris Person on Aftermath (a site that, to warn you, sometimes blocks articles behind paywalls) gives us a big list of web forums that still exist, and are even popular, today. There’s many categories there, but indeed gaming is one of them. We have a vested interest in the survival of as many non-social-media sites as possible, so here is the whole list of gaming boards from the article:
That’s a lot! There’s a lo more links there too, including a big list of technology and compute forums. By all means, click through, to the article, for more!
Super Mario 64 has 120 Stars to collect, 90 of them from individual named missions in the game’s 15 courses. Many players find that a fairly early one, Snowman’s Lost His Head in Course 4, Cool Cool Mountain, is among the most vexing. When I played it, I found it a illustrative example of what happens when the game gives you imprecise directions, and just asks you to try. I did try, time after time, until it just seemed to work, for some reason I couldn’t figure figure out, and by that point I was just happy to be done with it.
Cool Cool Mountain is a big area with sloped paths leading from the top leading to the bottom. For this Star, some ways up there’s a snowball that talks to you, asking if you could lead it to its body, a larger snowball, some ways down. As it rolls it grows in size. Ideally you stay ahead of it the whole way, and managed to get it to crash into its body. If this happens, it spawns a Star; if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t appear, leaving you to exit the course from the pause button or collect a different star before trying again.
The problem is, you can do exactly what I explained and the snowhead still won’t collide with the snowbody. Sometimes the head seems to aim at your position near the end of its route, but sometimes it doesn’t, and even when it does, you have to be standing in a narrow region in order for it to produce the necessary impact.
As it turns out there’s three requirements. Kaze Emanuar broke them down in a two-minute Youtube video last year. It’s pretty short as far as these videos go!
The requirements are:
You must enter a single invisible sphere partway down, on the bridge along the route, before the snowball does on its trip. If you don’t, the snowball will continue, but it won’t even try to hit the body. You’ve already failed it.
At a specific spot towards the end of its route, it’ll check if you’re within a cone in front of its movement. If you aren’t, then it’ll just continue on and out off the course as if you hadn’t hit he sphere.
If you are within that cone, it will then direct its movement towards your location. If you aren’t standing so it’ll collide with the body, it can still miss it and you’ll fail the star.
The thing is, to a player, it looks like you’re only really needed at the end of the route. Why do you have to hit the sphere first? Even if you manage to stay ahead off the snowball the whole way, if you don’t touch the completely invisible sphere, the whole thing will break. And since it’s on a bridge, it looks like it should be fine to take a shortcut off onto the lower path.
Further, you have to be both within the cone and in a place where the snowball will collide with the body. There are many places you can stand that would direct the snowball to hit the body, but aren’t in the cone! The cone is also invisible, and the range off places you can stand to complete it is quite narrow.
Watch the video for the full details, it’s really short! Kaze does a good job of explaining it.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
We try here to introduce people to things they may not have seen. This means having a certain mental model of our audience, a guess of what you have and haven’t seen before. And since you’re a bunch of people, a clowder of individuals, even the best guess I make could be wrong for many of you.
(Clowder is a term for a group of cats, not people, but it seemed appropriate in this case. Meow.)
I’d expect that today’s presentation is already known to some of you, it’s very popular on Youtube, with the pilot, from a year ago, having racked up a third of a billion views. But if I asked a random person on the street, “Hey, isn’t the Amazing Digital Circus great?” I’d get blank looks. But then, here in the US, I think certain political choices are beyond obvious, yet I personally know people who choose otherwise. We all have our intellectual ruts.
Let’s not veer too far from the subject. It should be enough to say that even very popular internet things may not be known to those who are not “very online.” So it is with the Amazing Digital Circus. Created by Gooseworx, who also created the animation Little Runmo (previously here, and again in playable game form), The Amazing Digital Circus is about human characters who get transported into a digital reality and are left stranded there. While it’s not explicitly a game, we do consider all forms of electronic entertainment within our sphere of discussion, and the A.D.C. is very game-like.
At first, the Amazing Digital Circus looks like it’s a crazy-fun kind of cartoon, but it doesn’t take long for the lore to set in, and reveal that there’s a lot more going on than there may seem at first. In the Circus, the humans have a whimsical representation that they didn’t choose, and none of them are much pleased to be stuck there. The circus is overseen by a ringmaster, Caine, who has godlike powers. Caine is an interesting figure, he creates adventure situations for the humans to overcome, and is antagonistic, but isn’t a evil figure. He’s not responsible for the humans being in there or stuck there. Humans in the Circus who give in to despair tend to become abstracted, becoming big and mindless glitchy eyeball monsters, so Caine tries to give the surviving humans things to do to preserve their sanity, even though he’s not really all that sane himself.
The main character though is Pomni, the Circus’ newest inhabitant, and the least content with her predicament. Will she find a way out, or will she eventually manage to make peace with being trapped in the Circus’s virtual world? My own theory is that the human characters aren’t really humans, but copies of humans, that think they’re the originals, so it doesn’t really make sense to “escape” the Circus. But that’s just a guess, and a really big guess at that. Let’s see where it goes.
So far, there are three episodes, each about 25 minutes long, so set a little time for each one.
The pilot is episode one, where Pomni enters the Circus and we meet the other characters:
Episode two is Candy Carrier Chaos, which focuses on an “NPC,” a character who isn’t a human:
Episode three, just a couple of days old as of this post, is The Mystery of Mildenhall Manor, which reveals some off the backstory of one of the human characters, Kinger:
We’re on UFO 50 kick here, there’s so many nice games in there, and of such a wide variety. And that starts right off with the first game in the set, Barbuta, a simple but mysterious platformer.
I suggest walking one tile to the right, then immediately restarting the game. You’ll see why.
Barbuta is made in an old school style, and it’s rough, although short. You get seven lives, instead of the one a really old game might give you, but there are no continues. The very first screen contains a death trap. It’s the kind that you won’t fall for more than once, but it teaches an important lesson: pay attention to the terrain. Anything that looks unusual, different from its surroundings, could be important, or deadly.
Rather than tell you of my findings, which might not be too useful since, while I’ve gotten some ways in, I haven’t finished it yet, I present a Youtube walkthrough from sylvie (32 minues). If you just need a nudge you could just watch a few minutes, until you find something that gets you unstuck. That’s my recommendation, anyway.
As previously reported, UFO 50 is a collection of 50 solid games made by Spelunky creator Derek Yu and a number of collaborators over eight years. It costs $25 and is very much worth it. It invents a fictional game console maker and studio called UFO Soft, and also an elaborate backstory around the games’ construction. It contains a Little Computer People-like garden animation that expands as you play, and even a cheat terminal that no doubt hides many secrets to be found. Half the games even have local multiplayer.
Pilot Quest’s title screen
Many of the games in UFO 50 are deep enough that they could have been released on their own. One of them is Game #44, Pilot Quest, which is a nice little mixture of action-adventure exploration and idle game mechanics.
It stars Pilot, a character who appears in several other games in UFO 50. Pilot’s first game in the company’s fictional sequence is Planet Zoldath, where he must survive a weird and randomly-generated world. Pilot helms the Campanella, a cute little red spaceship that has a problem with crashing, and that also appears in several games. Pilot’s sister, Isabelle, is another recurring presence in UFO 50. Pilot’s the head of his own little invented franchise, UFO Soft’s version of Mario.
UFO 50’s title screen makes evident that Pilot and Isabell are a big deal (names here added by me)
There aren’t many easy games in UFO 50, and Pilot Quest is challenging, but because it’s partly an idle game, you can make progress even when you’re not playing. If you have trouble with the Wild Area, you can close the game for a while and come back when your garden and alien friends have generated more resources for you. (Sometimes. I’ve found that sometimes the feature’s a bit buggy. But if you leave UFO 50 running you seem to earn resources at the right speed, even if you’re playing a different game in the collection.)
But how does all that work out? Well, I’ve prepared a bit of a guide here, to help get you started playing this, one of UFO 50’s deeper games….
This is the game we’re talking about here. The others will have to wait until later. About 12 hours later, which is how long a standard first play of Pilot Quest requires.
Getting Underway
After a cutscene that shows the Campanella getting struck by an asteroid, you’ll be left on the surface of the plane in an area we’ll call Camp. Talk to the characters to learn a bit more about what’s happening, but the most important thing here is the big spinning diamond. That’s called the Moon Crystal. It’s an inexhaustible supply of Moon Drops, the first of the game’s several resources. Moon Drops aren’t very valuable in general, but they can get you on your way to collecting the most important resource, Moon Ingots.
The Moon Crystal. You will come to hate it.
Every strike of the Moon Crystal with your basic combat Yo-Yo will generate one Moon Drop. (Did Pilot get his yo-yo from Mikey from The Goonies II, Mike from Startropics, or Ness from Earthbound?) Moon Drops don’t automatically go to your inventory: you must step close enough to collect them, so if you don’t move around once in a while you’ll miss out on some of them.
1,000 (yes, with three zeroes!) can be converted into one Moon Ingot. But once in a while the Moon Crystal will drop a Moon Ingot at random. This is pretty nice when it happens at the start of the game! More likely though you’ll have to grind Drops for a bit. If you talk to the tree in the upper-left of the camp area, you can pay an increasing number of Moon Drops to grow plants that will automatically generate Drops for you. At first though their rate is very slow. It’s best to buy the first two upgrades when you can, but save the third for after you’ve got your first Moon Ingot. You can’t have a whole lot of most resources, including Moon Drops, until you’ve expanded your storage a bit, which needs Ingots.
Your Moon Drop Garden
But the first upgrade you can buy, the Hunter’s Shack, only costs one Ingot. It’s an important upgrade, because it gives you a free Meat, and after a bit of time generates more Meat that you can buy for 500 Drops. In Camp, really the only things you can do with Drops is buy Drop-making plants, convert them into Ingots, and buy Meat with them, so there’s not a lot of reason to focus on Drops unless you’re desperate for Meat.
With Meat, you’ll be able to explore the Wild Area, which is the main focus of your efforts. In order to win, you’ll need three Ship Parts that are hidden in dungeons in the Wild Area. But you won’t be able to get them for a while, because each hunk of Meat only gives you 120 seconds to explore it! You can use more Meat at once for more time, and in fact you’re forced to use all the Meat you have whenever you enter the Wild Area, but at the start you only have one Meat, and can only carry up to five anyway.
Part of the Wild Area
The Wild Area is a much better place to collect many resources than Camp. In Camp, you have to save up 1,000 Drops to get an Ingot or rely on a rare event; in the Wild Area, they’re common drops from enemies! You’ll want to explore the Wild Area as much as you can, meaning you’ll want lots of Meat, and fortunately Meat also appears fairly often there.
Like most of the games in UFO 50, there is no supplied manual, and little in the way of instructions, so the rules of the Wild Area aren’t clearly communicated. Here they are:
To keep anything you find in the Wild Area, you must exit it before time runs out. If you don’t, then all your effort is wasted. It’s always better to leave with something than nothing.
The timer is your health. When you take damage from enemies, shots or hazards, it comes out of your time. Most enemies drain the clock of 30 seconds when they hit you. Ouch!
Hit enemies with your Yo-Yo to damage them. Most enemies take from three to ten hits to kill.
Enemies drop random resources when killed. There are also jars and skulls you can find that give you resources when broken. Treasure chests drop a whole lot!
This isn’t so important on your first playthrough, but will become evident if you try to load a video walkthrough: while the map is the generally the same each game, some routes are randomly blocked, forcing you to explore by different means each game. The contents of the caves you find in the Wild Area are also shuffled on each playthrough.
This game randomization only happens at the start of play: each exploration of the Wild Area doesn’t reshuffle the maze, so if you find a useful nearby cave on one expedition, you can rely upon it until you win the game; if you choose to start over then (Pilot Quest has a New Game+ mode), then you’ll have to learn new routes, and rediscover what’s in the caves.
Another part of the Wild Area
The map isn’t the only way Pilot Quest wields randomness against you. The tricky thing about the Wild Area is that most of the enemies have of a lot of randomness in their movement and attacks. Your Yo-Yo only has a short range, so you have to get close to the monsters to hit them, and it’s easy for one to suddenly decide to bump into you or shoot. You can mitigate this somewhat by trying to attack them kind of on a diagonal, but there’s really no way to completely avoid damage. You should always be aware of how much time you’ll need to get back to Camp.
This will risk becoming a full walkthrough if I don’t stop myself here, so I’ll leave you with a few tips:
Whenever possible, you want to use Meat found in the Wild Area to fund your next trip into its depths. Meat drops randomly, but treasure chests and strong enemies generate it fairly frequently.
Once you have more Ingots, you can build housing for friendly aliens, who will help out if you build them workbenches. All of this costs Ingots, but they can generate more Ingots for you over time.
When exploring the Wild Zone, there is a tendency to try to push your timer as far as you can. Resist this urge, especially if it involves fighting monsters. Every monster type has enough randomness in its movement and attacks that it could ding you at nearly any time, and the less time you have left, the more a 30 second penalty will hurt. Remember: run out of time, and you lose everything you collected, and all the Zoldnarks you had whether you collected them that trip or not.
Pilot’s Quest really isn’t that hard once you’ve built up your Camp a bit. Eventually you can carry up to 25 chunks of Meat, enough for 50 minutes of exploration, more than enough time to clear out the whole map in one run if you don’t take much damage.
It’s possible to gain more time while in the Wild.
The dungeons have more than just your ship parts. There are secret passages you can walk through to find lots of resources.
By completing a subquest in the Wild Area (check the caves), you can get a gun! It takes Moon Drops to fire it, but it makes enemies a lot easier to deal with.
There’s a miniboss in the area north of the entrance that can tear you up if you’re unprepared, but there’s a trick to beating it.
The dungeon layouts also change with each play, but not much.
Somewhere in the Wild Area (different each game) is a Gear that’s essential to bring back to Camp, in order to start generating Science.
There’s a spider miniboss that you should defeat once you start building up substantial amounts of Meat, that unlocks a new resource when you beat it.
A new and dangerous monster appears in the Wild Area when you get two ship pieces. You don’t have to pursue it to win the game, and since it’ll probably involve exploring the whole place several times in one Wild Area run and fighting it several times you’ll want a full tank of Meat to even try. Beating it is involved in the extra “Cherry” goal for Pilot Quest.
One of the game’s three dungeons
To win the game, you’ll need to collect all three Ship Parts, and to build the Ship Fuel. Fuel costs 1,000 Ingots and 1,000 Science. That is literally all you need to win, but it can help accelerate your progress to build other items too.
Once you win the game, in short order Pilot will crash again, starting you over from scratch. However, on subsequent playthroughs, there will be a trio of statues by the tree in the upper-left of Camp. You can buy one upgrade there per trip through the game, that can make playing through again easier, or faster, in different ways. Try them out, if you want to risk another trip through the wilds of Planet Zoldath.
Everything’s day-glo on Planet Zoldath
If you want to watch someone’s first-time, unspoiled playthrough of Pilot Quest (which itself eventually spoils the whole game), here’s Val1407’s 12 hour playthrough, full of drama and suffering:
