Why would someone make something like this? I’m glad they did though. It’s fifteen minutes long, made for a pair of Japanese Sharp-produces home computers. Note that the proper name for this is not ASCII-art, as it makes heavy use of Japanese characters. Also note that enemy shots don’t ever seem to contact the player’s ship despite appearing to contact it in multiple places, so I don’t know how accurate the conversion is. Also also: no music, and only the occasional beep for sound. And, after the second level, it loops through some basic terrain forever with no enemies, with no Moai Stage, so you can stop watching after the second Big Core blows up.
(The Japanese description to the video notes that there’s no hit detection and no enemies after Stage 2.)
For this perceptive podcast, I sat down with Camila Gormaz and Pablo Videla from This I Dreamt to talk about Long Gone Days. We spoke about how the project began, what it was like creating a game in a modern setting and trying to balance the story with the JRPG-inspired combat.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
If you’re familiar with Pokemon creatures, you might understand this sequence of four short animations from NCHProductions a little better, but really, it won’t be that helpful. They’re weird, but fun, but weird. They relate a sequence of events, which I say because I can’t bring myself to call it a story.
#1: Eevee Tries a Lemon (1 minute)
#2: Eevee Disassembles a Magnemite (2 minutes)
#3: Magmemites (who are also bodybuilders for some reason) evolves into Magneton, and also Umbreon’s there (1 1/2 minutes)
Hebereke is that NES game, released in European territories as Ufouria, with the cute, yet somewhat bizarre, characters. It recently got a Switch release (“Enjoy edition”), and kind of a sequel.
Sunsoft has released some animations of Hebe and his friends on their Youtube channel. Each is very short, and entirely in Japanese, but most of them don’t have words anyway, and they’re all of a style of humor that I don’t think they make a huge amount of sense even in their native language.
They’re all collected in this playlist, but a couple of selections should help you understand what you’re in for. All of these are about one minute long.
Hebe buys a toy gun:
Hebe and Sukezaemon race on what I’m going to call jet-powered “vehicles”:
There’s this image going around, referred to in this video as a “greentext” image, in that way that people who are very online will just throw out there and expect that everyone knows what they’re talking about when other people (like myself) who are at least as online don’t know because they weren’t online in the same way. It seems that a “greentext” image is that way because it’s a quote in an old 4chan thread. Bleh.
But anyway. Said image is a list of obscure, but apparently canonical, facts about everyone’s favorite money-grubbing antiplumber, Wario. Narrator Mish Koz goes through each fact and tries to determine from whence it came. Many of them are sourced from an old Nintendo website. They’re entertaining at least, for 17 minutes. Here is the video:
The facts are:
He has a bee allergy
He likes wrestling & country music
His favorite foods
He can bench press 200 kg
Dr Crygor uses him as a guinea pig for his experiments
He goes treasure hunting with Mona
He gave 9-Volt a GBA
The reason for his immortality is he doesn’t feel like dying
Things Wario hates: smart things, jerks that are stingy with their money, chocolate with peanuts, marron glacés, peppers and jigsaw puzzles
Wario’s spending habits: he spends most of it on food
He ate 100 Poison Mushrooms and red and white spots appeared over his body
He washes his clothes every 10 days
The source of his powers: garlic
He has a farming background, although no one seems to actually know the source for this fact
Computer entertainment is a wide field, and it’s easy to forget that it’s not all jut vidja gmaes. Por ejemplo.
On Linux machines, there is a system “device” called /dev/zero. If you pipe its cont ents into something else, like a file, it provides an endless stream of zero bits.
Someone, going off of that idea, created another virtual device called /dev/one. It produces an endless sequence of 1 bits. Usually this takes the form of 255 bytes, which are binary 11111111.
/dev/zero is more useful than /dev/one, since zero bits also make zero bytes. Usually, if you’re using /dev/zero, you don’t actually care much about the data you get anyway. /dev/one is mostly for the entertainment of a weird sort of Linux user, presumably one that makes jokes about vi and Emacs.
Well to that kind of person, /dev/scream should be 20% more entertaining still. (A 20% increase should rightfully, I think, be called a “Dash.”) It produces an endless randomized sequence of two characters, capital and lowercase A, and capital and lowercase H. So:
“AHAhaHaAAHHahaaAhAhHAHaAhAAHHhah”
The fact that it could be interpreted as either a sequence of screaming, or a sequence of laughing, could be taken as either a bug or a feature.
Set Side B’s mission statement is to cover three categories of gaming: retro, which let’s be honest is most of what we do; indie, often the province of blogmate Josh Bycer; and niche, which is usually what all the Nintendo stuff gets filed under.
Well, you don’t get much more niche than the category of CP/M gaming. CP/M, or “Control Program for Microcomputers,” is an ancient OS for 8-bit Z80 computers that recently turned 50. Half a century old! While CP/M was very popular in its era and had a lot of software made for it, much of it is obscure and hard to find now, and in histories of home computing tends to get largely overshadowed by Apple and Commodore. It’s a huge vanished scene, but it can be thought of as the DOS before DOS: the OS that would become PC-DOS, then later MS-DOS, was made as a recreation of CP/M’s API for the 8086 family of processors.
If you think MS-DOS software looks primitive then CP/M will appear to you like the freaking Stone Age. MS-DOS had early adapters like CGA and EGA for graphics, but CP/M had none of those. The point of CP/M was that it ran on a plethora of systems, from manufacturers like Kaypro and Osbourne. Many big microcomputers from the age, like the Commodore 64, TRS-80 and Atari 8-bit line, had add-on cartridges with Z80 processors in them so they could take advantage of the huge CP/M software library. Since the point of CP/M, as would be for MS-DOS later, then Windows after that, was cross-compatibility, it had to run on all those systems. But it didn’t have the IBM PC’s standardized graphics hardware, so little, if any, CP/M software took advantage of special graphics functionality. It’s all terminal gaming.
A beneficiary of the limited prospects for games on the CP/M was Infocom, which released a number of their early titles, including the Zork trilogy, on CP/M, which wouldn’t be held back by the lack of graphics. But other games were made. Many of these titles were reviewed by the ultra-niche blog TechTinkering, which has a Youtube channel, which uploaded video of a lot of CP/M software, including Mission: Impossible.
Mission: Impossible, by Richard Altman, is one of the category of terminal games, which are often played by printing information on the game state to the screen, then asking the player to enter options from a numbered list. In addition to only rarely having real-time play, because there are no visual or aural components to engage the senses, a lot of the weight has to be borne by the gameplay, which often means it’s pretty difficult. It’s of the class of games that can be found in David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games books, games like Star Trek, Lemonade Stand and Hammurabi.
Mission: Impossible is a fairly complex game that I don’t yet fully understand. Here, watch TechTinkering’s 19-minute video on it.
It might not seem like it, but in the 8- and 16-bit era, text in a game was rather expensive.
The expressive power of an English sentence is great, but in a way, that of an equal number of bytes of assembly is greater, due to it living and working in the machine, and not just in the head of the player. A page of text is about 700 words; at an average of five characters each, uncompressed that’s 3,500 bytes, or 3.5 kilobytes. By contrast,the whole OS of the Commodore 64, Kernel and BASIC ROMs combined, is 8K.
Most JRPGs are thought to have lots of text, but really they have less than you might think. Square used a few tricks to make a little text seem like more than it really was: like the use of larger fonts, and using graphics to put on little skits to illustrate scenes instead of just displaying them as plain old words. And of course there’s compression. A good compression scheme, while troublesome for fan translators, can still cut down the size of text by half.
But Earthbound is a unique game in many ways, and one of them is the amount of text it has. Creator Shigesato Itoi is a copywriter and essayist, and he wrote a ton of words for Mother 2, Earthbound’s Japanese version. Translator Marcus Lindblom gave it a localization that many regard as one of the greatest of all, that manages to get across much of the wit and charm of the original.
It was a huge task. The text dump on GameFAQs, compiled by someone going by the name “BlueberryButtface,” is 391 kilobytes; the size of the game’s ROM is a bit over 3 megabytes. A direct comparison isn’t really helpful because the dump on the page is uncompressed, but it’s still useful to get a sense of scale.
A lot of this text, as it turns out, is hidden. Not in the sense of being locked off from the player, unused in the game. The text is findable in the game, but much of it is obscure, available only at a specific part of the game, or easy to miss. And, this being Earthbound, much of the text is pretty funny!
On Youtube (again), Cybershell has put together a 28-minute video that uncovers much of this hard-to find text. I already knew about much of it, because I’m weird like that, but it’s nice to have someone present a guide to what’s there and how to find it. A lot of it is the text of the Hint Guy, who, as in the style of Nintendo’s games at the time, will give you a pointer to whatever you have to do next in the story if you pay him a fee. All the hotels in the game have newspaper text appropriate to the point of the story you’re in, even the one way back in Onett, the starting town. Items have interesting descriptions if you think to ask for them. And of course, after you win the game, you can go back in and talk to the NPCs on the way back home, and frog help me, Shigesato Itoi wrote, and Marcus Lindblom translated, congratulatory text for nearly everyone in the game. And there’s more, even than that.
Here’s the video. It’s a fun use of half an hour, if you have any interest in Earthbound.
It’s a whole blog devoted to Sega’s arcade hit, and inspiration for some of the animals that Sonic rescues: Flicky! It doesn’t post frequently, but it doesn’t have to!
Flicky is a wonderful little game, if you’ve never played it. It’s sort of like Mappy meets City Connection. You guide a bluebird through a horizontally-scrolling level to rescue baby chicks from cats. Weirdly, the cats can’t actually hurt the chicks, but they can hurt you.
The standout post on the blog is a discussion of Flicky’s place in Sega’s history, which mentions that the game was created by Youji Ishii, who would go on to create Fantasy Zone! There really should be more games like Flicky and Fantasy Zone, I think. And I’m right!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
On Youtube, Triforcefilms has made it their niche to sing music from various game and other media properties a cappella, that is, entirely with voice doing the music.
They have lots of videos, and are still going today, but the one I’m choosing to call out is from nine years ago, their rendition of music from one of the lesser-known NES efforts: Konami’s Blades of Steel, which despite the name isn’t a fantasy hack-and-slash game, but a hockey game, actually a conversion of an arcade game of the same name, both with unexpectedly atmospheric visuals and music.
Here’s a link to a playlist of the NES soundtrack. The highlight I think is the game setup menu. While a zamboni resurfaces the ice for the upcoming match, one of the better menu tracks in the NES library plays in the background. It’s the first of three pieces in Triforcefilms’ video (2 minutes), which are the menu theme, the match start theme, and the intermission. They don’t adapt the triumphant victory theme, but I’ll take what we get.
Note, if you’re confused by the unexpected appearance of Gradius towards the end, that’s from NES Blades of Steel! As a minigame, sometimes you get to shoot at the Big Core during intermission. Win or lose, it doesn’t affect the match, and you still get the advertisement for other Konami properties.
Three videos of a Youtuber called SwimYBO going through all three of Infocom’s classic Zork games. Zork was originally made for the PDP-10 by a number of students at MIT as a larger and funnier version of Colossal Cave, and was made all as one game. When remade for a variety of home microcomputers at the time, it was written in a special language, ZIL, for a virtual machine called the Z Machine. So, the game writers wrote their games once for ZIL, which had a Z Machine written for each of the target platforms. This explains how they were able to relatively easily port for every platform under the sun, back when there were over a dozen, and also why most of their games looked like they were the output of a simple terminal emulator.
Infocom was bought by Activision, used as a brand for a number of weird titles like an NES game, and eventually the Zork name would be applied to a pair of Windows graphicadventures. The property currently lies dormant in the hands of an uncarring megacorp, along with many other old computer game settings, characters and properties from over the proliferating decades of time since Pong.
Anyway. SwimYBO’s playthroughs go through the entire game and reveal all the puzzles and solutions, but they do leave some of the descriptions and game lore unrevealed for a player who might come to them later.
Zork I (“The Great Underground Empire,” 29 minutes):
