The subject of this post is Elie D’s 13 minute video about one of the mascot characters in Nintendo’s Mario universe thing. Here:
I could launch immediately into a tirade that people shouldn’t invest self-worth into what amounts to, not just a cartoon character, but a corporate-owned cartoon character.
But I don’t really want to? Despite everything we still don’t have as much female representation in gaming than we should have. The Mario character lineup still skews about 90% male. These are characters that people embody within a game, there should be more girls. (Also, why are three of them princesses?)
Overall this is a pretty silly topic for a non-Sunday post, but I have something unexpectedly great for each of the next two upcoming Sundays, so I wanted to squeeze this in while the squeezing was hot.
I’m a bit late to the trough on this one, but it’s worth calling back to the Video Game History Foundation’s recent release of over 100 ROMs and other data from the Sega Channel, that short-lived service that allowed subscribers with a model peripheral to play downloaded games over a cable TV line. It was kind of like a terrestrial version of Nintendo’s Satellaview service, but also one that wasn’t locked to Japan.
Some of these games were never released outside of the Sega Channel, and the VGHF also has unreleased prototypes for public perusal through their own archived collection and an association with Gaming Alexandria. Two particular finds are a hitherto undiscovered variant of a Garfield game and a Genesis Flintstones game that, at a glance, seems to be based off of the John Goodman movie. An abandoned project also in the collection is a Sega Genesis web browser, which would have been quite a thing to see back then. Notably, Gaming Alexandria’s torrent of the complete data is only 147 megabytes, which isn’t such a large download all told.
Image from the VGHF’s site. This would have seen release probably around 1999. For reference, the Sega Saturn and Playstation were released in 1994, and the Nintendo 64 was released in 1996.
The VGCF prepared a 58-minute promo video for their project here, with commercials and other content that are, ah, very nineties in style.
As an aside, I was shocked to see the company General Instrument come up early in this video. Weren’t those the people who made chips for pre-VCS dedicated game consoles back in the 70s? As it turns out, yes they were (PDF link)!
Did you know there are seven of them? Really! Super Mario World has way more moons than you need to win the game, by a large margin, but it still feels special to find one of these secret collectables.
MarMax Gaming points out all their locations in this video (10 minutes). There’s not a huge numbers of reasons to get them all, Super Mario World practically throws extra lives at you, but you still might want to know how to find them. Well, this is how. Here:
There was once a time when Compute’s Gazette, the Commodore 64 type-in magazine, was nearly the center of the computing world.
An important source of low-cost computer software from the age before the internet, Compute’s Gazette distributed a variety of software, including a couple of games each issue. They also distributed Speedscript, an important early word processor, which was one of their biggest hits. But for kids, the games were the most important thing.
The C64 Appreciation Society recently typed in the early CG game The Frantic Fisherman, and made a fifteen minute video demonstrating the process and the game. Remember, while you could order a 5¼” disk with all of an issues programs on it, most people who wanted to use them had to sit down in front of their machine and type on line after line of code. It often took hours, and even with error checking software like The Automatic Proofreader and MLX to help, the danger of typos was great.
The Frantic Fisherman is not a terrific game. It’s really simple, just a matter of moving your fisherperson to the right place and either swinging your club or raising your umbrella. You can select the speed, but it doesn’t get faster naturally as you play. But it’s a good demonstration of what magazine type-in games from the time were like. Take a look, and travel back in time.
I was just thinking a few days ago, It’s been quite some time since we’ve heard from Retro Game Mechanics Explained. In fact, looking at their channel, it’s been eight months since their last deep dive into video game internals, their terrific (if somewhat dry) look into how Super Mario Bros. 2 stores and constructs its levels (1h40m!), drawing their tiles directly into a bank of work RAM specially included in the cartridge for that purpose.
Yesterday they broke their silence with an examination of the startup routines of arcade Galaxian, Teddy Boy, Joust 2, Pac-Man and Super Pac-Man. It’s “only” 41 minutes, but it’s hugely informative of the necessities of how and why arcades games go about arcading:
I will summarize. The main task an arcade machine must do upon startup is test as much of the hardware as it is able and confirm that it’s operational. The main part of this is testing the various memory types comprising the machine’s storage systems: audio, video and work RAM, and program and graphics ROM. Not just to test them, but to stop operation and alert the operator if something is awry. The garbage often shown on-screen on powerup is a direct result of writing and reading 0s and 1s to and fr0m every bit in the video RAM. The system must also check the contents of the ROM, which is usually done by adding all the values in each bank and comparing them to a known total, literally called a “checksum.”
It’s a fine explainer, even if they didn’t cover my personal favorite game startup, that of Twinbee and Gradius with the Bubble Memory system . The storage media of the game was unreliable unless it had physically warmed up, so when turned on it would play music while the game was making itself presentable, known fondly as the Morning Music. I posted about this way back in 2022! Here it is again. It would be an excellent tune to set a wake-up alarm on a cellphone. Just saying.
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the (Game Wisdom) channel. Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection.
Earthbound is, of course, the classic SNES JRPG, known in Japan as Mother 2, created by Shigesato Itoi. It has my vote for the greatest JRPG of all, for while it isn’t as popular as Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, it has a knockout story, full of wit and detail. Mother is one of the very few video game series that, I think, transcends its medium, and becomes something great, not great in the since of being better than good, but in the sense of profundity, and yet at the same time it isn’t pretentious at all, it’s light and funny and whimsical but also deep and dark and terrifying. It’s easy to play and lots of fun too. I’ve heard it described, I think it was by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, as Peanuts Fights the Cthulhu Mythos, and that begins to get to it.
Animation collaborations are, of course, a thing where a bunch of people get together to make an animation together, each taking one small part of the whole. Not only do they not attempt to maintain a consistent art style, that’s in fact the last thing they try to do. Each clip is wildly different from the others, and that’s the point, the clash of styles making the whole surreal and surprising.
Both of these come together, in this piece that animates a portion Earthbound where the player is accompanied by the Flying Men, and I guess I have to explain that too.
So in a place near the end of the game your protagonist Ness visits the realm of Magicant, a bizarre realm created from the depths of his own mind. It is full of dangerous monsters, culminating in an artifact called Ness’s Nightmare, a powerful enemy that can wipe Ness out if the dice don’t roll his way.
Ness is also alone for this segment, except for the aid of the Flying Men, who call themselves Ness’s courage, helpful bird people who tag along with Ness, providing both muscle and extra hit points. But while they are strong and useful, they are not invulnerable. There are five Flying Men, and they join Ness one at a time. If one of them runs out of HP it dies, and in the house where they live, one of them is replaced by a tombstone. If you go back and recruit another one, and he also dies, then another tombstone appears. The dialogue from the successive Flying Men becomes less happy and more desperate as their numbers decrease, until finally they’re all gone, and Ness is left to finish the area alone.
This is just one example of the many wonderful ideas in Earthbound, as a unique a video game as there ever has been.
The animation that’s this week’s subject is a collaboration between many people, set to the Flying Men’s theme song, which is never actually heard in its entirety within the game. The music heard comes from a soundtrack album.
I won’t pretend it’s very comprehensible to those who’ve never played the game. Sometimes Earthbound fanwork, unlike the game, gets obtuse and navel-gazey, and difficult to understand to those not drenched in the lore. This one’s a bit like that. But maybe it’ll spark something in you, anyway. The music’s nice at least!
That’s what I have for you today. See you tomorrow!
1. Every row and column must contain the same number of red and blue spaces.
2. Every numbered space must have the same number of spaces touching it (in the eight spaces around it) as its color.
3. No two adjacent rows or columns can have the same sequence of colors. In practice this is the most subtle rule. It doesn’t always come into play, but if it does it’ll probably be the breakthrough you’ll need to pull off a solve.
The starting position of one of the more difficult puzzles.
Every puzzle has a unique solution. It is similar in style to another web puzzle called 0h h1, but a major difference in presentation is that Urjo is watching as you try to solve it, and won’t let you make incorrect moves. Instead, it counts up all your mistakes and scores you on how well you did. You have an overall rating that goes up as you both complete puzzles with fewer errors and faster times than other solvers. This can be annoying (it’s easy to click the wrong size of a circle on accident), and it pushes you to try to solve them faster than you may feel comfortable, which may also cause inadvertent mistakes.
The software will try to give you puzzles just past your skill level, and I can verify that they get very difficult. If you make mistakes it’ll offer to give you some pointers. Myself I ignore those tips; but I can see how some people might find them useful.
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
words.zip is a fun word search kind of game. It’s an infinite field of random letters. You try to find words snaking through the array. Words can twist and turn, and can also go backwards, but can’t go diagonally, cross themselves, or intersect with any other word that someone else has ever found.
Here I’ve found the word ROUGH in this relatively uncluttered area of the board. Apparently I’m the first person to ever find it! This is the fourth such word I’ve found since I started playing, and the shortest.
There is no scoring, but there is a newly-added list of challenges, various categories to try to find words in. If you decide to play, I think you should start out immediately dragging the field in one direction until you find an area almost devoid of other players’ words, and start from there. Of course as time passes it’ll get harder to find unique words. I read somewhere that there are plans to implement private games, with new fields to search through uncluttered by people entering ASS or POOT. If the well-hoed field is too much to tiptoe through, maybe come back in a week or two and see if that feature has gone live.
A quick one today, busyman demonstrates six ways to crash Scribblenauts games. To remind: Scribblenauts is a game where you have a magic notebook that creates things you write in it, if you just know the word for it. It’s one of a very small number of games that attempt to be exhaustive over some domain: if you know the word for it, then there’s likely to be an object in Scribblenauts if you try to create it. This required a great deal of work to realize, but worked well enough that they even could include some memes in its huge database. “Loituma Girl” is demonstrated in the below video (4½ minutes).
Starting with its sequel Super Scribblenauts, they’re also adjectives in the game. This video seems to be from a version with adjectives: one of the objects is “resurrective dark matter,” although attempts to find resurrective in a dictionary will probably fail.
Because Scribblenauts games contain thousands of items, some with unique properties, finding all the ways that they adversely interact would be very difficult. The above video demonstrates six ways that they can be brought together in order to crash the game.
The gameplay of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is famously limited to three days. After three days the moon crashes into the town, destroying it. You have to go back in time before then (which also saves the game) and continue completing subquests in a non-linear, atemporal kind of way.
But as it turns out, there is a way around it, which puts the game into a sort of limbo. People who would ordinarily be moving around on their schedules are completely missing. Entering into some buildings crashes the game. In any event you’re stuck until you finally play the Song of Time and reset the world, getting events back on track.
But how does this happen? And how is the time system implemented internally? It turns out to be quite the interesting breakdown. Skawo (I imagine it said like the Daleks’ home world pronounced by Elmer Fudd or Homestar Runner), who is starting to seem almost like the PannenKoek of the Ocarina of Time engine games explains it in 15 minutes, here:
