Another Retro Blog: Retro365

If blogging is ever going to come back from its loss to social media, it’s going to have to be from going more social itself. By that I mean links between blogs, making it easier to surface sites to others. Not only directly, but by helping to raise each other’s Google rank, although I think time has shown that Google is a fickle friend to people producing material for the Web, any site prominence you gain can easily be wiped away the next time they change their algorithm. Bigsites naturally get traffic just from being established, and other sites try to become big by gaming their placement with hyper artificial SEO techniques. Meanwhile us littlesites have to succeed largely by being interesting and direct views, as well as what traffic we can gather through followers through RSS, social media, Patreon and other sources. And there’s no reason not to help each other out. We’re not in competition between us. Any cross link, wherever, strengthens us all.

Here’s one from me. Retro365 has a vast collection of gaming media from the earlier days of home computing, and has been going for about three years now. They’ve got lots of demonstrated software on their Youtube channel. If you have an interest in learning about, or just seeing this stuff, they’ve got plenty for you.

Here’s a few choice items from their channel. There’s the classic CGA DOS game Paratrooper (the player doesn’t last long, only a minute):

Dungeon! for Apple II, published by TSR themselves in 1982 (32 minutes):

Oil’s Well for the Atari 400 and 800, a variant of the arcade game Anteater (8 minutes):

And a complete playthrough of comedy adventure game classic Sam & Max Hit the Road for PC (an hour and 47 minutes):

Retro365 blog, and on Youtube.

Folding Ideas: Why It’s Rude To Suck At World of Warcraft

Another another video again once more! And this is a big one. Dan Olson of Folding Ideas tends to post long-form, movie-length videos on its subjects. They were the toast of the internet for a while after their brutal takedown of NFTs and cryptocurrencies (2h 18m), which was recently followed up by an equally detonative look at NFT-based libertarian techbro virtual world Decentraland (1h 49m-I told you they were long).

Between those two worthy video conflagrations they produced a video that is rather in our backyard, a one hour, 24 minute vid-essay on who World of Warcraft became a place where playing sub-optimally isn’t just frowned upon, but came to be seen as anti-social. If you’re interested in the social aspects of MMORPGs, It’s worth devoting an eleventh of a day’s waking hours to!

What’s really interesting here is something I’ve been worried about with older video and computer games for a while. Games that manage to still be popular over a lot period get focused on, dissected, sometimes disassembled, and laid out so that they have no secrets. Their audience both focuses on them, and both seeks out ways to play them better, and reasons to play them better.

That’s where speedrunning comes from, and that’s the thing-what’s happening in WoW is just what’s happening to classic gaming in general. It’s become a degraded form of play, almost, to come to a game completely new. I’ve bought into this too, occasionally leaving a message on a Youtube video of someone playing sub-optimally giving a couple of helpful tips. Really though there’s no need. If they wanted to do that, the avenues are available to them. There’s already plenty of people trying to play, say, Castlevania III in the best possible way.

World of Warcraft is 19 years old now, and even has an entire official alternate version that duplicates the game experience from launch. During that time the expert-level strategies that were discovered by players after long observation and practice have become ubiquitous lore. Even if you’ve never read a FAQ or watched a tutorial video, just from hearing other players talk about the game and watching them, a lot of it will seep in.

As a result, not only can’t a long-time player go back to how they experienced the game at launch, because they know too much, but even new players can’t, because the community around them is filled by those players who know that much.

There’s lots to think about here. Especially if you’ve played World of Warcraft before, but also if you haven’t. (I haven’t!) Also note that the video is consciously patterned after Jon Bois’s videos for SBNation and Secret Base. Here in 2023, that’s a comforting reference.

Why It’s Rude To Suck At Warcraft (Youtube, 1h24m)

More Game Map Sites

We’re still searching for old game info sites that are still up in 2023. Another couple of use are Video Game Maps, last updated in 2007 but still available, and Revned’s Video Game Maps, which saw its last edit in 2016, but is mirrored on Github.

It feels, to me, like this is what the World Wide Web should look like, flat, static HTML pages with sidebars and hyperlinks. A thing of beauty.

For the past 20 years it’s felt like any game information you could ever hope to find is out there on the World Wide Web, somewhere, but as both the people who grew up playing these games grow old, and the drive and motivation to start and maintain websites has diminished with the popularity of social media, this is increasingly no longer the case. Sometimes you can find vanished websites on the Wayback Machine, but it’s a lot harder to find things there, Wayback often misses images, their web archives are often incomplete, and server-side scripts are broken by archiving so dynamic content is usually dead, the page contents locked in the state it was at when the time of archival.

VGM: Maps and Strategies! and Revned’s Video Game Maps

NES Maps and SNES Maps

I’ve banged this drum a lot lately it feels like, but I have to reemphasize that the internet is not forever, and as Ryan North has told us lately, even the most popular website in the world is one missed bill from disappearing, probably forever. As this happens more and more often, big and well-funded content hosts like Fandom and Github persist, while smaller, independent information sources tend to fall away, which results in a rich-get-richer feedback loop. Independent sources of accurate information are so important, no matter the subject. It is difficult to fault anyone unwilling to keep content up and updated for a large portion of their lives, but whenever it happens, I appreciate it.

Before the death of Flash, their Zelda map used it to provide an interactive browsing experience that is sadly defunct now. This PNG version is still great, though.

So I’ve been trying to celebrate the best, most long-lived websites out there, and NES Maps, and its sister site SNES Maps, qualifies, going back to around 2006. That’s 17 years! And it’s still there, quietly providing maps of just about any NES game you might want to find information on.

It’s not perfect. Their labeled maps of Castlevania III, I discovered just now, are incomplete, cutting off after Block 5, promising that more is coming soon for who knows how many years. But most other games have complete maps, including a number of Japanese-only title. It’s truly a great resource, and I hope they can figure out a way to keep it going for the long term.

NES Maps and SNES Maps

Loadstar!

Now is the beginning of a fantastic journey!

Aah that’s a screen I haven’t seen in a long long time.

1982 saw the founding of the Apple II computer magazine-on-disk Softdisk. Soon after Softdisk Publishing produced disks for other home computers too. One of them, Big Blue Disk, has gone down in history as previous employer of some of the original principals of id Software, especially John Carmack and John Romero. But another of Softdisk’s legacies was their Commodore 64 product, Loadstar, probably the longest-lived Commodore 64 software publisher. They published C64 software from 1984 to 2007. And most, if not all, of it is available online!

Loadstar is yet another of those computer gaming stories that must be told, and I’m in a pretty good place to tell some of it, because I beta tested for them for many of those years, and sold programs to them as well. Yes, several of their releases bear the programmer name John “The Mad Gamer” Harris. You have to understand, this was long before the word gamer reached common usage. In fact, as someone who may have primacy over the use of the term, I hereby forbid its use by anyone with misogynistic, anti-trans or racist intent. It is so decreed, hey-nonny-nonny!

Loadstar was lots of fun. Every month they’d send you two disks in the mail with several new pieces of Commodore 64 software on it. Under the watchful eyes of Fender Tucker and Jeff Jones, and later on Dave Moorman, it’s not that they grew an empire of Commodore programs, but they did manage to sustain that platform for a small but avid userbase for far longer than you’d have thought possible.

I plan to start doing Loadstar reviews eventually, but in the meantime, you can try out some of the later issues of this important piece of computing history at the site linked below. Note that you’ll have to have a means of running C64 software to use them, of course. The emulator VICE is known to work well. And if you want to hear the words of Fender, Jeff or Dave yourself, all three are on Facebook.

The LOADSTAR Library

Romhack Thursday: Final Fantasy for MSX, in English

On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

There was a period during the 8-bit era where games best known for being on the NES could get ports to other machines. Most of the ports we got in the US and Europe were not that great. There were a fair number of classic NES games with lackluster home computer adaptions. Even the best of these, like Mighty Bomb Jack, Castlevania and Life Force for the Commodore 64, usually paled compared to their NES counterparts.

I put the blame for this on the cartridge format. While a much more expensive media for releasing software than disks or tapes, it had the great advantage of being enormously flexible. The whole phenomena of mapper chips and other in-cart add-on hardware on the NES had no counterpart on the C64 during its heyday, even though there was really no reason the ’64 couldn’t use the same kinds of chips that the NES used.

Things were a little different in Japan on their native microcomputer platforms. While anemic ports were certainly possible there (like the infamous Super Mario Bros. Special) a fair number of console games got pretty good computer ports. Many of the best of these were for the Sharp X68000, a system I really must cover in detail soon, but the MSX platform got a fair number, many due to the efforts of Konami.

Both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy for MSX ports with their own unique properties. Today’s post is about Final Fantasy, which recently got an English translation, and which in play and structure resembles its NES original to a large degree. It’s even a slight upgrade, with more colors in its characters and able to make use of an MSX sound expansion cartridge for improved music.

The game was reimplemented from the ground up, so it’s even missing many of the bugs that the Famicom original, forged out of raw bytecode as it was by consummate hacker Nasir Gebelli, is known to have. It would probably be the definitive early version of Final Fantasy if it didn’t play painfully slowly. You can’t see it in these screenshots, but instead of the world sliding smoothly across the screen as on the NES the terrain snaps by in eight pixel steps, and your party also walks more slowly than on Nintendo’s machine. And while it’s not as bad as loading times in the Playstation 1 Final Fantasy games, the game still lingers on a blank screen for several seconds when fights begin and end, which will drive you nuts before long.

The English translation patch that FCandChill put together basically just uses the NES game’s script, so no surprises there. These days games in the style of those early JRPGs are quite out of style, but if you still have a hankering to play a game that basically demands that you grind out levels to have a chance and where you will almost certainly total party wipe at least once during your run, you could do worse.

English translation patch of Final Fantasy for the MSX2 (romhacking.net)

The Latin American Games 2023 Showcase

This is an indie showcase covering the demos I check out during the Latin American Games Showcase for 2023.

0:00 Intro
00:29 Super Crane Bug
1:56 Uniduni
3:07 Tiny Witch
4:21 The Bunny Graveyard
5:45 Super Hiking League DX
7:33 God Machine
8:44 Hannah

Set Side B is One Year Old!

Thanks for reading Set Side B! This year we’ve talked about roguelikes and classic arcade games and romhacks and silly game videos and even some more esoteric subjects, like Wordle clones and crossword puzzles, and all kinds of other things. We intend to bring you lots more, over the next year, from the Flipside of Gaming.

Might I suggest taking a moment to investigate some of our finely-sifted tags? There’s @Play, the continuation of my old GameSetWatch roguelike column, Arcade for Arcade Mermaid and other arcade gaming posts, Sundry Sunday for fun gaming memes and videos, and Romhack for Romhack Thursday and similar posts.

PannenKoek2012 Returns: Crashing Super Mario 64 With Pendulums

PannenKoel2012 is the Super Mario 64 enthusiast (that’s the only word I can think of that matches) who has been working on reducing the number of A button presses needed to finish the game. They haven’t gotten it down to zero yet, and likely never will, but by resorting to increasingly extreme measures they continue to figure out ways to get it down. I think they’ve been working at this project for over 12 years; the oldest video on their Youtube account is that old.

Of arguably more interest than their quest, though, is its interesting byproducts, which is a series of Youtube videos, on both their main channel and alternate channel UncommentatedPannen, which not only explain how their many subtle and effective stratagems work, but also a number of aspects of how Super Mario 64’s engine works, and even basic principles of computer science. These videos are so in-depth that they have their own wiki to track the concepts they use, to explain turns like Parallel Universe (PU) and Pedro Spot.

When I say they return, it’s not that they ever left, but it’d been a while since they had a solid explainer. Now they have one, it has spoken narration instead of the text that marks many of the best videos, and the production values have even increased a bit:

In this video, a clever way to manipulate the pendulums in Tick Tock Clock to crash the game after 39 1/2 days of playing also takes into its sweep an excellent explanation of many of the systems compilers use to represent numbers and their limitations.

And here are a number of those interesting videos (by no means complete) that they’ve posted in the past: The Art of Cloning (17m29s) – Walls, Floors and Ceilings parts One (37m23s), Two (32m5s) and Three (37m26s, all three together being a pretty through explanation of how Mario 64’s platforming system works) – Blinking (eyes, 8m40s) – Floats (9m23s) – Pause Buffering (8m7s) – Pitch Conversation and Yaw Velocity Conservation (15m15s) – Sleeping (Mario, 7m25s) – Random Number Generation (12m37s) – Wall Hitboxes (6m50s) – Releasing Objects (5m18s) – How Holding Objects Really Works (12m1s) – Units, Speed and Sense of Scale (4m41s)

How to Crash SM64 Using a Pendulum (Youtube, one hour 12 minutes)