It’s a weird thing to change, but there is a slight difference between the version of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! in the Playchoice-10 version than any other version of the program. As explained on the NES/Famicom game’s page at The Cutting Room Floor, when you start a game in Playchoice Punch-Out, it asks you to enter your initials.
Image from The Cutting Room Floor
It does this because of a couple of other changes: the player is identified by their initials before each fight, and it saves a high score table for each fight that’s displayed when the game comes up in attract mode.
While we’re on the subject of Playchoice differences, on dual-screen Playchoice-10 machines, the top screen is used as a simple UI for selecting games and tracking how much playtime you have left, but it also displays instructions for the game. The instruction screen for Metroid contains a simple map of the first area. (Cutting Room Floor article with image)
Just a minor thing today, as I’ve been splitting my time between other projects. I may have mentioned the Punch-Out fact here before, but if I have it’s been awhile.
We collect literally hundreds of links in compiling stuff to you, far more to give everything its own post. Here’s a scattershot collection of some of it, we hope that one or two of them might strike your discriminating fancy.
We dusted off the image editor and made the first new page header in years! It’s about time too, for it’s time to shorten our list of pages before they threaten to overwhelm our nonexistent offices.
1. Seminal official D&D blobber Eye of The Beholder got a C64 port three years ago. That’s how long this link’s been laying at the bottom of our barrel. Here’s a demonstration video. (37 minutes) If you play it on a C128 in C128 mode, it uses the 80-column screen to display a map! Something to try out in VICE.
2. Also from around that time LowSpecGamer did a video exploring the origins of the ARM processor. (18 minutes) It was created by people new to processor construction for British Acorn microcomputers, and from there expanded and grew until now it’s the most popular processor style in the whole world, backing both Apple and Android devices, by a long shot. It’s beginning to make inroads into desktop use even; I’m currently writing this on an ARM-powered Raspberry Pi 500+.
3. onaretrotip shows off cancelled arcade games in two videos, Part 1 (18 minutes) and Part 2 (32 minutes).
4. I’ve been having a distracting amount of fun on a kind of public Unix/Linux machine called a tilde lately. I plan on writing a lot more on my experiences, but in the meantime you can find out what they’re about, including finding one to sign up for yourself, at tildeverse.org.
6. A late-breaking development, the 25-year-old forums of classic gaming site Digital Press have been destroyed, apparently due to miscommunication between owners, in order to save a little bit of cash every month. As Time Extension reports, this is a gigantic blow to the retro gaming community, there was a huge amount of information that was contained there, and the Wayback Machine’s preservation of these forums is scattershot.
7. To throw in another last-second inclusion, Nintendo’s “My Nintendo” store is changing its name to just the “Nintendo Store.” This is their web shop, not their console-based digital game sales service called eShop, although you can buy downloadable games from the site too. I’d link to the announcement, but they stupidly only made it via Twitter. Get with the times, Nintendo!
It’s an hour and 54 minutes long, but Greg Sewart’s doc on the Ridge Racer series is a through backgrounder on every game with that name, and all the others too like Rave Racer and Rage Racer. From 1993 to 2016, it’s a family reunion of the whole dual-R clan, from arcades to Sony consoles to the odd Nintendo machine to smartphones. You really don’t get much more niche than that.
Gauntlet is one of the best games that Atari Games made, and is certainly one of the best known, but it’s interesting how little even people who played it know about it.
Gauntlet has 100 levels, although seven of them take the form of an in-game tutorial. The first level has three exits; one if market EXIT TO 4 and another EXIT TO 8. EXIT TO FOUR skips the player forward a bit, and EXIT TO 8 leaves the training levels entirely. This is how Atari Games’ standard difficulty selection is implemented in Gauntlet, the first levels introduce various game concepts gradually: Ghosts & Generators, Grunts, Demons, Lobbers, Deaths, and Sorcerers get their own spotlights.
Starting with Level 8 though, the remaining 93 levels are part of a great loop. Players will notice that the difficulty increases greatly with Level 8. Which level is 8 actually varies between plays. Gauntlet lasts forever, there is no ending level and the loop never ends. When the last player in the game runs out of health, the machine remembers which level in the loop the game ended on. The next game begins at the start of the tutorial levels again, and when that game reaches Level 8, it’ll be the map that the previous game ended on. (More information on arcade Gauntlet can be found in FalkentyneDragon’s classic infosheet on GameFAQs.)
More than that, the game is known to remove food from levels, depending on how many players are in the game (fewer players means less food), player scores, which characters are being played and how many credits have been inserted during the current game.
Later revisions of the game put the screws on more tightly to try to prevent marathon games. Despite this, very good players can play indefinitely with certain characters. In this ten hour Youtube video, mackey_special plays continuously with Elf through 474 levels.
If you want to find out more, watch the video. They have videos for all four characters on their channel, here.
Note: I am not sure this is arcade Gauntlet. It’s possible that it’s the Japanese Mega Drive version. The Arcade Mode of Genesis/Mega Drive versions of Gauntlet (known as Gauntlet IV in some territories) looks and plays very similarly to the arcade version.
WARNING: This isn’t a Youtube video! It’s good old text, like Frog intended the internet to be!
Over on The Gamesoft Fun Club, David Cabrera explains how great arcade Ridge Racer is, that isn’t exactly like the Playstation version, in fact it runs on more powerful hardware. And he’s played so much of it, including on the recent Arcade Archives release, that he has one of the top 50 times in the world on it. He’s so enthusiastic about it that I think it may nearly rival my own obsession with arcade Rampart, although that’d be quite a lot of unhealthy focus indeed.
Image from the linked article.
Mind you, arcade Ridge Racer only has one course, although according to David it plays quite differently depending on your difficulty. There’s an extra section that opens up at the higher levels, and the course is designed so that higher speeds requires more skill to make it through without crashing.
It’s not really a long article so go give it a read? It’s the kind of thing that makes the web great.
Jamey Pittman is the creator of the foremost document on the workings of Pac-Man ever created, the Pac-Man Dossier. If you’ve never read it, but have any interest in playing classic Pac-Man, then you should go read it immediately. It will make so many things make sense to you.
Pac-Man has a reputation as a game of patterns, and seems designed in such a way as to enable patterns to work. The only randomness is in the behavior of the ghosts when they’re vulnerable, and even then, if the player has performed the same moves at the same times up to that point in the level, even their vulnerable behavior will be consistent. Its GCC-developed follow-up, Ms. Pac-Man, has the red and pink ghosts move randomly at the start of each board specifically to foil patterns.
But you don’t have to play Pac-Man as a pattern game. It is possible to play it “freestyle,” like a naive player would, reacting to the ghosts’ movements. You’re unlikely to make it to Pac-Man’s famous kill screen at board 256 that way, but you can still make it pretty far.
Key to doing that is keeping the ghosts as close to each other as you can. The ghosts are much more dangerous when they’re scattered around you, because they can block off all of your escape routes. Four ghosts piled up on the same spot not only can’t block off other corridors, but their AIs tend to continue to keep them together, at least when they’re far away from Pac-Man. Red and Orange behave identically when they’re at a distance, and Pink’s behavior appear to be more like Red’s the further away from Pac-Man it us. Blue has the most chance of diverging, but often moves the same way anyway.
Not only does keeping the ghosts clustered make survival easier, but it makes it much easier to eat all of them with a single Energizer. The ghosts only turn blue up to around the 4/6th Key board, but up to that point it’s basically impossible to get the maximum score from every Energizer if one hasn’t managed to herd the ghosts into a single, easy-to-gobble blob.
That’s where Jamey’s tutorial comes through. It presents a series of situations and techniques for getting the ghosts near each other and moving as one unit, whether it’s for avoiding them or getting the maximum points from an Energizer. It’s a bit much for casual play, but it can be very interesting to see how a true expert goes about doing it. Here, then, is the tutorial (27 minutes):
If you know where to look, there are many arcade machine restoration videos on Youtube, whole channels devoted to them. This Halloween-themed video from Electric Starship Arcade is only one of them. It’s mostly about the process of fixing up the cabinet and has very little gameplay, but it does end with a fun sequence where they dress up someone as a vampire and, driven in a hearse, bring him out in a coffin to introduce it! (40 minutes) And if you watch it, it’ll haunt your view history, and influence Youtube into recommending more restoration videos to you, in a suitably spooky fashion. Ooooooo!
Another arcade classic strategy rundown, and again c0ncerning Donkey Kong. As the video rightly notes, the Springs board, a.k.a. Elevators, is most devoted players’ greatest barrier to playing to the kill screen, and even pros mess it up sometimes. I think it’s the worst part of the game, personally. Donkey Kong is great, says I, because it’s open to multiple strategies, while the later Elevators boards have to be finished a specific way, all because of those springs. That way is what this video (4m) is about.
Sadly the video has been made non-embedable, so it’s up to you to follow the link, if you care. The video encapsulates information on donkeykongforum.net (which it mislinks). That link is some hardcore geekery, of the kind beloved to Set Side B’s cadre of pixelated aliens, so please take a look.
Image from donkeykongforums.net.
Here’s the basics, in text form. Donkey Kong gets more difficult over the course of five “levels.” These are different from “boards,” a.k.a. “racks” or “screens.” In the corner of the screen there’s a notice, “L=X” where X is some number. That’s the Level. It goes up by one every time you finish a Rivets board.
The problem is, starting with Level 2, the spots at which the springs hit the ground is slightly randomized. The final climb up to Pauline’s platform is super dangerous, since Mario is vulnerable the whole way. Level 4 is the hardest difficulty for the springs on Elevators, and you have to handle it a very specific way: climb up to the first safe spot, wait for a spring that comes out bouncing at a specific location (near DK’s right foot) then running to another safe spot, then waiting for another specific spring speed to rush over and up the ladder.
So go forth and conquer the elevators, and as Coily the Sprite reminds us:
Our retro arcade strategy week is over, but this is a related video that I’ve been sitting on for quite a while. The Disconnector made a very nice strategy video (20 minutes) for Namco’s cult favorite cat-and-mouse game Mappy. It works as both an introduction and a guide to the game as it develops.
Not only is the information good, but it’s really well put together! Looking through the rest of their channel, while the post about other games (most recently about Robotron [8 minutes]) it seems to be the only strategy video of its sort. I hope they make more, I think they have a talent for it!
You play Q*bert, and at first it seems simple. Level 1, you jump on each cube once. Slick and/0r Sam may change them back once in a while, but you can just jump on them again.
Level 2, you jump on each cube twice. That makes each level twice as long, but still not much of a problem. The rising difficulty here comes from more and faster enemies.
Then you reach Level 3, and Q*bert becomes a much different game. Now jumping on a solved cube unsolves it. If you don’t work out how to handle this, levels can drag on indefinitely. It’s a bit of a wall for players here, and Slick and Sam become much more annoying.
Level 4 is similar, except you have to jump on each cube twice, and jumping on one after it’s complete changes it back to the intermediate color. But worst is Level 5, where jumping on a solved cube changes it back to the original color. This is a huge change, for it means the pyramid can actually become unsolvable without using a Disk, or waiting for Slick or Sam to come in and reset some of the cubes. For more details, I refer you to the video. You know, the one I embedded a few paragraphs up. Go! And if you think that’s nuts, check out what happens in the unreleased sequel Faster, Harder, More Challenging Q*bert (GameFAQs link).
Something I’ve thought is interesting about Q*bert, which is also true of Pac-Man, is that it’s like a turn-based game, but where you can play around with the timing of the moves. I’ll try to explain.
While both games let you decide when to make decisions, both encourage playing in a discrete, point-by-point way. When Q*bert lands on a cube, there’s a limited number of decisions they can make, other than waiting to make your move. In Pac-Man, your moves are constrained to the maze paths, but you can turn slightly early, you can pause when you hit a wall, and you can double back at any point. You usually don’t want to pause or double back in that game, because they introduce uncertainty in patterns (although a few patterns rely on them, which makes them much harder to perform). Q*bert is resistant to patterns, using pseudorandomness to affect the paths of the balls and most enemies, and the player’s ability to break out of the rigid temporal confines of that game’s movement is more helpful.
Contrast both games to Robotron and Defender. Those games have “free” movement, they’re not confined to a playfield with limited choices but let the player move around how they want. In actuality they’re games where the turns are taken in real time each frame. That adds a much greater role for player skill, but it also requires you to be much more precise.
Defender’s difficulty is legendary. Craig Kubey in The Winner’s Guide to Video Games said it was like being locked in a closet with a swarm of killer bees, and I actually think that’s not overstatement. And yet, people have flipped Defender’s score counter many times in a single game.
In an 18-minute strategy session, Joe Dearman explains the basics of playing Defender well, but I’m afraid if you don’t have a certain base facility it might be hopeless. Although I’m generally good at video games, I don’t seem to have it myself. Take a look and see if this looks like something you might be good at, but be warned, Defender’s controls themselves are complicated, with a lever and five buttons, although I dunno, game controllers these days tend to have many more than that. It is important, however, not to underestimate this game. It will rapidly annihilate you if you aren’t very good.
Both Defender and Robotron 2084, mentioned yesterday, were made by Williams, and designed by Eugene Jarvis, who still works in arcade game production today, or did last time I checked.
Another thing these games have in common is they’re very adjustable. Operators can choose starting difficulty, ending difficulty and on which wave it’s reached. This thread at arcade-museum.com breaks down the different romsets and differences between them. The earlier roms, “Blue” and “Green,” are generally harder, and increase in difficulty through 99 possible levels. The most common and latest set, “Red,” only has 30 effective levels.
At the higher numbers of Blue and Green, weird behavior can be seen. Defender has an enemy called the Baiter, which exists to harass the player if they take too long in clearing a wave of other enemies. At maximum difficulty Baiters become hilariously numerous, the game sending them in about once every two or three seconds. Watch a few minutes of this game with the wave difficulty settings cranked up to maximum from wave 1 (39 minutes). The extra ship level is set it easier than normal, needing just 5K to get an extra, and it’s set to restore all the Humanoids every wave, but that’s mostly to make the game possible, although there does exist video of someone surviving maximum difficulty with ships and Humanoids at normal settings, up to a score of 909K. (1 hour 7 minutes, somehow).
Here is the first of those two links, I’ll leave the other for you to click on if you’re interested. Both of them have the amazingly persistent Baiters, and in both of them the player manages to hold up under the pressure, for a while anyway.
It’s the third of this week’s classic arcade strategy find posts, and today’s dedicated to the original twin-stick shooter, Robotron 2084.
Robotron’s what I’d call a very pure game. It’s simple in play, nowhere near as complex as Eugene Jarvis’ first game Defender, but deep despite it. The left joystick moves, the right joystick fires, and until you get used to that you’ll have short games. In fact, you’ll probably have short games regardless. It is ruthless.
These videos feature host “Greg” and star player “Darrin,” who is the one giving most of the advice. The first video covers the first nine waves (5½ minutes). They set the template for the game: there are theme levels that cycle every ten waves. There are Spheroid, Quark, Brain and, for levels ending in 9, Grunt waves that completely surround you with enemies right from the start, and each poses its own kind of challenge.
The videos mention three parts, but it appears that only two were ever uploaded. They mention a site in their descriptions, robotron2084guidebook.com. In the 12 years since the videos were posted that site’s gone dark, but being a text site it’s pretty well preserved on the Wayback Machine, and has lots of good information. They also mention video on the high score site scoreground.com, but sadly it’s also defunct, and the mentioned video that was hosted there is probably lost. If there’s one good thing about Google, I guess, it’s that they let Youtube videos persist on their site for decades without culling them too much.
