Tag: 3dPlatformer

Why Is “Snowman’s Lost His Head” So Hard?

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.

Image from Mario Party Legacy

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.

Gamefinds: Blob the Klex

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.

The title is a little mysterious. What is a Klex, and why is it named Blob? Or is Blobbing something that one does to a Klex?

As it turns out, Klex is a kittycat! A black cat, that looks, a bit, like a black blob that moves around. Klex is the name, Blob is what it is. I can ignore the order of the nouns in the title for cuteness factor.

Cat games are springing up in greater numbers. All spiritual descendants of their great ancestor Neko, more lately you play as the cat. Maybe Stray was what kicked them off, but more recently there was the wonderful Little Kitty, Big City. (I interviewed its creators over on Game Developer!)

Blog the Klex is a demo for another cat game, currently being worked on by Sigma Unit. It’s free at itch.io. It’s being worked on by a much smaller team, and there isn’t a lot to do in the demo, but it shows a terrific sense of whimsy. Klex is adorable, and plays differently from the unnamed kitty in LKBC. LKBC is quite a vertical game, with a lot of climbing around, but Klex mostly runs on the ground with some jumping.

Klex’s animation is “procedural,” meaning in this case that the game figures out where their front paws go, and the rest of the cat follows from that. As Klex runs, there’s a jingling, like of a jingle ball rolling along, that perfectly follows their foorsteps. It’s a case where the sum is greater than the parts: the cat’s head, eyes huge, staying perfectly level, while their paws move in a flurry beneath them, jingling away. It’s very cute. Then you hold the Dash button down, and it gets cuter. You have to experience it to understand. You should. Also, Klex is more apt to squeeze themselves into narrow spaces than the cat in KLBC, and has a very cat-like ability to walk on narrow ledges. They also have an uncat-like ability to turn themself into a bouncy ball. Maybe Klex is part Samus.

The game itself, as it currently is, is brief, a sequence of areas where it’s left to you to figure out how to progress. Like LKBC there is nothing that can harm the cat. The worst that can happen is you fall off of a roof, and the game voids you out and puts you back on the rooftop. (I don’t know why you can even fall off; there’s a lot of invisible walls around to keep you on track. Maybe they have later plans for those street areas.)

Most of it is straightforward, but there are a couple of places where you might get stuck, until you realize you can grab some moving objects by holding down the Interact button. Once you know that you shouldn’t have much trouble. You’ll know the demo is over because you’ll get a screen of credits.

Please give Blob the Klex a try! And enjoy a few screenshots:

Blob the Klex Demo (itch.io, $0)