Tag: book2

Nintendo vs. Smash Bros. Tournaments

Oh Nintendo. As people following this blog can easily see, we have more than a little fondness for the output resulting from the playing card and igo board maker’s lucrative side venture into video games. Everyone wants to make them like Nintendo, but no one else actually does, or seems to be able to, or can even pin down what that would mean.

Super Smash Bros. Melee, the game potentially most harmed by Nintendo’s policies (image from MobyGames)

Maybe it’s because, despite being one of the biggest companies in the world, it still feels like a small company, in some ways? Or that they don’t seem as beholden to the bleeding knife of capitalism as other companies are? (This is illusory, of course.) Maybe it’s their adherence to Japanese corporate traditions, or the influence of Shigeru Miyamoto, or their toymaker’s vibe?

But there is a dark side to them as well: they can be incredibly controlling regarding their IPs. Years ago they reached out to a fan

They have what they would call a staunch anti-piracy stance, which you’d expect of most software companies sure, but what that ends up meaning, due to the fact that 99% of their software is made for closed systems like consoles and mobile (we haven’t forgotten about the Animal Crossing PC clock!), they have absolutely no modding support.

This has resulted in a zero-tolerance policy regarding infractions concerning the competitive Smash Bros. scene. Project M is a popular fan-made hack of Super Smash Bros. Melee that it feels like even mentioning will cause Nintendo to affix a red letter to your organization.

aMSa, the Yoshi-main Melee player who was the focus of AsumSaus’ excellent documentary (image from AsumSaus’ video)

Kotaku has reported that there is currently another round of fan backlash over Nintendo’s guidelines over the use of Smash Bros. games in community tournaments. There is good reason: the rules read like they were written by people ignorant of the extent of competitive Smash play.

Nintendo is also demanding tournament prices not rise above $5,000, and is disallowing sponsorships. While it’s true that Nintendo is justifiably a bit cautious about the edginess surrounding esports tournaments, which resulted in sexual misconduct allegations back in 2020, there is definitely a middle ground between preventing situations like that and hamstringing a burgeoning esport, and Nintendo should pursue it, or risk destroying this entire scene.

As I said, I am not a lawyer. Someone who is, is Moonie, who used his incredibly ZeFrank-sounding voice to made a Youtube video breaking down Nintendo’s new guidelines. He doesn’t seem as worried about them as others (the thumbnail to his video is a giant DON’T PANIC). Here is his 18-minute dive into the guidelines, but a major point is that they primarily affect unaffiliated community tournaments, which as a class are distinct from majors, which would have an explicit agreement with Nintendo that would make the limitations in these guidelines not apply. In order words, while some of the furor is justified (other companies like Capcom aren’t as limiting of community events), a lot of it is the result of failed Nintendo messaging. Nintendo does have a lot of trouble communicating things like this that won’t get everyone’s roar up.

But even with that proviso, it’s still not great? Nintendo is still claiming that fan modifications are entirely forbidden, even among community tournaments.

What do I think? Nintendo could fix all of this by changing their EULA by explicitly recognizing and allowing for fan work, but in a way that asserts the primacy of their IP. Again, IANAL, but if they put their own lawyers to work to try to forge a system whereby fans could continue to build off of their work, they might be able to do it in such a way that they don’t risk damaging their properties. Other companies have done it, notably Sega, who blessed fangame creators in a way that generated their megahit Sonic Mania. What is causing Nintendo’s overreaction here, in my onion*, is their institutional distaste for even acknowledging that people are hacking their systems and modifying their games in the first place.

* typo made on purpose

I must acknowledge, there would be a whole flowchart of knock-on effects if Nintendo were to acknowledge and accept fan modifications, and probably not all of them would be to Nintendo’s benefit. Particularly, just to modify their software requires breaking their system security, which doesn’t necessarily imply piracy but does mean opening up the system sandbox and maybe revealing system secrets like keys. Sega doesn’t make consoles any more, so it’s not an issue they have to worry about now.

But what is obvious is that they’ve frequently attacked a vibrant community, and making a lot of enemies out of players. There has to be a good solution to this.

Super Smash Bros. Fans Freak Out About New Nintendo Rules (Kotaku)

A Lawyer Analyzes Nintendo’s Tournament Guidelines (Moon Channel on Youtube, 18 minutes)

Candy Box 2

As foretold yesterday, today’s post is on the sequel to Candy Box, Candy Box 2.

The Map, where you travel to various locations. There’s a few secret areas to find here….
Those colored boxes are magic spells

It’s a much more developed game, with rather a lot of depth to it, but it’s still ultimately an incremental-style game in form, even if its not as direct about it as most of that benighted genre tend to be. There’s many more places to go and items to find than the first game, and a lot more secrets. If you don’t use the wiki, you’ll probably get stuck and have to search around for a few days until you find (or save up) the means to continue.

This monkey has an item you really want, if you can figure out a way to defeat him

While figuring out all the various ways to overcome the game’s puzzles is fun, I find the most interesting thing about Candy Box 2 to be its engine, which is surprisingly flexible for a game presented entirely with text characters, which is kind of like a deluxe Javascript version of the venerable Unix library curses. There’s windowing, a Z-order so objects can pass in front of others, and colors are used for magic effects, and some areas even have special effects, like scrolling around, zooming in on the action, or being able to swim up and down.

The highlight in this one is the puzzle the Cyclops at the lighthouse can eventually be persuaded to let you try, which as far as I can tell is of a completely novel type, and could be the subject of its own entire game. Good luck with that, by the way.

Like the first game, there was a preposterous Metafilter thread about Candy Box 2, and it’s even more full of spoilers, and equally as bizarre if taken out of context. Please enjoy responsibly.

Candy Box 2’s New Home (github.io)

Candy Box

I always thought this shopkeeper guy resembled Tom Baker as Doctor Who. Maybe it was intentional.

Candy Box is pretty ancient now, over ten years old. Here is the Metafilter post where we discussed it, which reads like the rantings of crazy people but is also full of spoilers. It was an early entry in the genre of incremental games, sometimes called “clickers,” like Cookie Clicker and Clicker Heroes, and may well have inspired some of them. It’s still online (at a new home), and its still just as playable as it always was, its extremely ASCII presentation now even more appealing now than it was back in 2013.

While it may have helped kicked off the genre, I feel it’s important to point out that there’s actually a lot more going on here than Number Go Up. You go on quests! You have equipment! You have an alternate currency to track, lollipops, with different production characteristics!

Candy Box is a game that’s best experienced going in cold, but since its gleeful hugeness is less of a hilarious shock now that countless other games have done it too, it might help a bit to give you some starting advice. Eating candy isn’t useless: it increases your maximum HP.

Every time you reach what you think is the pinnacle of ridiculousness, some new aspect is introduced. By the end you’ll be mixing up candy potions, using a a candy alchemy system much more detailed than most AAA game’s crafting systems, using only two ingredients.

There’s a sequel too, but let’s save that for tomorrow….

ALL HAIL THE FROG

Candy Box’s New Home (github.io)

Sudo Sweep

It’s not a command to delete temp files as root on a Unix-styled system! It’s a fun and free little game over at itch.io!

The board on the left is a Sudoku-like game; the board on the right is Minesweeper. The two boards match: the numbers on the Sudoku board are the number of mines in the matching area of the Minesweeper game. You use each to help you solve the other!

It’s not perfect, mind you. There’s currently no way to mark a square that definitely has a mine in it, just the question marks you see in the right-hand board above. There are still cases, familiar to players of standard Minesweeper, where you end up having to guess. And don’t click the “change size” button if you care about the current game: it doesn’t make the boards larger, it starts a new game with bigger Minesweeper and Sudoku boards!

Still though, I have to give creator Rianna Suen props for a cool idea! I found this through the “map obelisk” area during Roguelike Celebration, which is a pretty cool place to find things beloved of clever people!

Sudo Sweep (itch.io, free, playable by web)

Advance Wars By Web

Advance Wars By Web is a long-standing website allowing for Advance Wars games to take place between players online. It’s old enough that it came out before Advance Wars Dual Strike, the first DS Advance Wars game, and has survived long enough to see the release of Dual Strike, Advance Wars Days of Ruin, and now Advance Wars 1+2: Reboot Camp.

The first Advance Wars game had a legendary awkward launch date: September 10, 2001. I don’t know if world events following it had any influence on its popularity, but Advance Wars had the advantage of being a long-running series, going back to the Famicom, that had never been given a chance in Western territories. (One reason? Super Famicom Wars had a notorious character named Hister, with a moustache that made its inspiration unmistakable.)

The first two Advance Wars titles, taking their name, like previous versions, from its release platform the Gameboy Advance, were unexpectedly popular. The gaming groups I was in in college played an incredible amount of Advance Wars 2. We maxed out the game’s timer at 999 hours! I have no doubt that, if our group hadn’t broken up from people graduating and leaving, we’d still be playing it today.

Both of these games are preserved in proper fashion by Wayforward’s Switch remake of Advance Wars and its immediate sequel. Of the two games after it, Dual Strike leans a bit too hard on CO powers (already a creeping problem in AW2), and Days of Ruin implemented a lot of gameplay adjustments and fixed but, alas, lost the weird sense of fun from the semi-cartoony characters and setting of the first two games.

The Gameboy Advance Advance Wars games did not have internet-enabled multiplayer. The DS versions had better options, but they’re unavailable now, at least without some technical effort, due to the shutdown of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

Advance Wars By Web both allows a game much like AW2 to be played over the internet, and it does so with features that make it feel like a play-by-mail game, with the site handling the state involved with turn-based multiplayer. It does this at the of having any form of single-player: all of its battles are against other human players. So it’s not an excellent way to learn to play Advance Wars games interactively, as with the official games, which easy you into the game a bit at a time. But as for learning how to play this online version, there’s a number of useful videos available on their Tutorials Page. I especially like their video on overcoming first turn advantage, which they do by spotting the second player one Infantry unit. It’s not a perfect solution, but one that works out fairly well in play. And the video on designing balanced multiplayer maps, which offers a lot of practical advice that can be carried over into designing maps for the original games. And there’s a huge library of over 3,800 games to view, if you want to see how the community plays.

I don’t know if Reboot Camp is helping to sustain the avid fandom that the first Advance Wars games did, but I’ve enjoyed it a lot. If you enjoy it too, you can go from Reboot Camp right into playing against people online on AWBW. I can’t offer much more about it than that, for Advance Wars is a deceptively deep game and I have to make a post here, on the average, every day, but it’s been offering online play between humans for nearly twenty years now! That has to count for something.

Advance Wars By Web (awbw.amarriner.com)

Sundry Sunday: Eggpo, Waiting

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

It’s been a while since we checked in with Eggpo, from “Two More Eggs,” that series the Brothers Chaps (creators of Homestar Runner) made for Disney XD or sommin like that. In case you forgot, Eggpo is the species of these eggplant people, whose job it is to attack the “good guy,” a.k.a. Dooble, who features in other TME videos.

Here, two Eggpos engage in the basic repetitive patterns entailed by their employment, without much success.

Eggpo: Waiting (Youtube, one minute)

JRPG Junkie Describes Lost Sega Arcade RPGs

Another JRPG post! That’s two in a row, and it’s about some quite interesting games, including a lost Shining Force game. The website JRPG Junkie tells us about some Sega arcade games that fit the mold that sound like they would have been interesting to have tried.

Quest of D (image from JRPG Junkie)

Quest of D was a dungeon crawler where the player’s inventory was collected as physical trading cards, that were scanned into the game in order to use them. Shining Force Cross was similar in concept but without the cards; it lasted until 2016. And finally there was Soul Reverse, introduced in 2018.

The world of Japanese arcade games from around this time is largely a big dark area to me, and right around the time when the US arcade industry started its death spiral. It was also a time when server connectivity and online updates came into vogue, meaning when the servers went down, many of them ceased to be playable. It’s really sad that this has become essentially a lost age of gaming, at least to people outside of Japan. We probably couldn’t play them then, and we certainly can’t now.

Dungeons & Deckbuilding: Sega’s Lost Arcade RPGs (JRPG Junkie)

Time-Limited Pumpkin Carving Game

Every year, the creator of A Short Hike turns on the servers for a pumpkin-carving game. This year he plans to keep them up until about a week after Halloween, so enjoy it while/when/if you can!

The carving interface is easy to use, although it does result in a glitch that has to be undone sometimes. Keep trying though!
There’s over 2,000 pumpkins to be seen so far, with the ability to favorite ones you like and award the best ones badges!
There’s more than just pumpkins to see, you can go on a hayride, explore a maze and find interesting spots too!
Nice Elder Sign!

The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival (itch.io for Windows, Mac and Linux, free but $2 gets you a cosmetic extra, goes offline after Halloween season)

Sundry Sunday: There’s Something About The Typing of the Dead

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

I’m going to be honest, I vary in my appreciation for TerminalMontage’s gaming-related Youtube animations. Sometimes I think they’re brilliant, other times I think they really try too hard to be edgy. At their best they use the purposely-janky animation to make a point about the subject. Previously I’ve linked to their Breath of the Wild “speedrun” animation, where some of the things that would ordinarily be kind of lolrandom inclusions were actually, amazingly, references to things players do in actual speedruns.

I think the pinnacle of their output has to be their depiction of the events of The Typing of the Dead, Sega’s side-sequel to The House of the Dead 2, which took that lightgun zombie-shooting arcade game and grafted a typing trainer onto it. It was one of the most memorable game experiences I’ve ever seen, not just for the crazy premise that entirely works, not for the ludicrous power of its word list, but because the boss fights were each reworked to fit into the style, and forced players to answer questions with the keyboard, or type ludicrous sentences to try to mess them up.

There’s Something About The Typing of the Dead takes the game’s premise and reworks it as if villain Goldman was a 4chan-style vomiter of memes, right down to having an Anonymous mask, and as such makes for a more effective villain than the actual game had. The computer-synthesized voices for the characters are on a par with the terrible voice acting in the game. Most of all, I’m pleased for the unexpected use of Whomst’d’ve at the end.

Now that I’ve finally managed to squeeze this video into Sundry Sunday, I look forward to never mentioning memes here ever ever again.

Something About the Typing of the Dead [Loud Sound Warning] (Youtube, 4 1/2 minutes)

Underlevel

It’s a quick and fun free game on itch.io! It was made for a game jam in 48 hours, with an updated build released a while after. It’s only been out for three months but it’s already become pretty popular, with its fun graphics and gameplay and appropriately frenetic music. It’s a good thing to mess around with for Spooky Month.

You’re the skeleton lord in charge of a five-level dungeon, but a knight has invaded your domain and means to destroy you! Rally your lollygagging skeleton minions, to both lead them to the safety of the downstairs and destroy as many of the gem-laden pots on each level as you can, before the knight gets to them first and smashes them to raise its experience level! If you can’t play it (that Windows thing, argh), here’s a playthrough on Youtube . (9 1/2 minutes)

You start each floor with one skeleton near the upstairs. The knight will arrive in just a few seconds, so use the mouse pointer to get it the hell away and guide it to other skeletons, who are just bumbling around having skeleton thoughts, and alert them! The skeletons with the yellow eyes are active, and will try to reach your pointer.

You’ll quickly discover that skeletons aren’t very smart (no brain, you see), and will often get caught up on walls. If the knight is close behind, you might have to abandon some. The skellies also stumble sometimes, like undead Pikmin. If you can get them to the downstairs, all of the active skeletons that touch it will leave the level and join your horde at the bottom of the dungeon, all but one. The last active skeleton cannot leave the level until all the other skeletons have evacuated and all the loot is gone.

Two things increase the knight’s level: killing skeletons and getting the gems out of smashed jars. If you can get a skeleton to run into a jar first, it’ll break and the gems inside will probably disappear before the knight can get to them! But if the knight is nearby it might grab the gems before they vanish!

The HUD has a lot of information that can help you out. The red arrow on the left side points the way to the downstairs. The left side also tells you how many loot jars and skeletons (“enemies”) are left on the level; both numbers must reach zero, either because of your actions or the knight’s, to move to the next floor. The lower-right corner has a “Knight Cam” that shows you what the knight is up to. It doesn’t tell you its location in the dungeon, but it can still be helpful in figuring out what it’s doing.

Clicking the mouse button will cause all of the active skeletons to jump, dodging any attacks the knight might make until they land again. (Be careful not to click outside the window!) The knight can attack on the move, and smashing a skeleton to bits doesn’t even slow it down. You can’t attack the Knight until the end of the dungeon, so don’t try to gang up on it. The knight also snatches up gems just by being near them, for it has one of those auto-pickup features. It sucks.

Fortunately, the knight isn’t any smarter than the skeletons, and it tends to go after the target that’s closest to it. You can even see its AI: its target path is shown onscreen as a thin line. It changes color, from white to yellow to orange, as it gets closer to whatever it wants to destroy.

If you’re having a bad game and want to start over, you can press F2 to do so. There is no “Are you sure?” prompt and it happens instantly, so be careful with that key.

The knight isn’t done until every skeleton is gone and every loot jar is smashed. It always pathfinds to the closest thing to break, so you can keep it distracted by leaving a jar in an out-of-the-way place for it to waste time running to.

You can see the knight’s level at the bottom of the screen, with a red bar indicating how close it is to gaining an experience level. Every skeleton you escape with is 10 HP off the knight at the end. If you can get to the end with the knight at level 9 or less you have a good chance of winning.

(A lot of the text of this post was reused from a Metafilter post I made on the game.)

Underlevel (itch.io, for Windows)

The Worst Possible Day to Play Nethack

As we’re reminded by abadidea on Mastodon, that day is today, October 13, 2023.

Nethack uses the system time-of-day clock to affect the game in modest ways. It figures out the phase of the moon, and if it’s a full moon the player’s “base luck,” the number at which it starts and tends to trend towards, is +1. Luck affects the game in many minor ways, most notably affecting the to-hit chances of striking monsters. Full moons also affect werecreatures and the chances to tame dogs, but those effects are highly situational.

Playing on a new moon has one effect, but it’s a big one. If you’re fighting a cockatrice and you hear its hissing, and are not carrying a lizard corpse, then you always begin turning to stone, instead of there only being a one-in-ten chance. This is what is called a “delayed instadeath”: you don’t die immediately, but if you don’t take immediate action it’ll happen in the next few turns. That’s the next few turns from the game’s perspective: various events may conspire to prevent you from getting that action at all. (The Nethack Wiki’s page on petrification is instructive.)

If you do get the turn, one of the things you can do is eat a lizard corpse, or that of another acidic monster. (Eating dead monsters raw is something you just end up doing often in Nethack.) If those aren’t at hand, what usually works is prayer, provided that you haven’t prayed too recently, your patron god is not angry with you and you’re not in Gehennom. Ordinarily, if you haven’t been playing badly, your god isn’t mad at you. If you’re in Gehennom you’re in the late game anyway, and probably have had ample opportunity to obtain one of the several ways of halting impending calcification.

Prayer is nearly a universal panacea, if it’s available. But there is one other thing that can block prayer: if your luck is negative. Even if it’s by just one point, prayer will never work.

That’s where the only other date effect in Nethack comes into play: on Friday the 13th, your luck defaults to -1, the opposite of the full moon effect. So, unless you’ve increased your luck by one of a number of means, prayer will never work on Friday the 13th. And today is both a new moon night and Friday the 13th. Other uses for prayer won’t work either: if you’re weak from hunger? Too bad. Low on hit points? Sorry. Punished with a ball and chain? Not going to work. Wearing cursed levitation boots? LOL.

Days that both have a new moon and are a Friday the 13th are rare. The last one was in July of 2018, before that November of 2015, and the one before that was in 1999. So, um, if you’ve been thinking about trying out this weird old roguelike game you’ve heard about, you might want to wait a bit. Until tomorrow, anyway.

Retro Game Mechanics Explains Mario 3’s Minigames

Let’s get the video embed out of the way first. Pow!

Super Mario Bros. 3 has two significant minigames (outside of two-player mode), and the inner workings of both are explained in this video.

In most worlds there are “Space Panels,” which provide a slot machine minigame for extra lives. If you’ve ever tried them, you might have noticed that it’s extremely difficult to win anything at it. Well, the video explains why that is: there’s a significant random element to stopping the wheels. In particular, the last wheel has so much randomness in when it actually stops that it’s actually completely random what it’ll stop on! So much for timing!

I have a theory (which I explain in a comment on that video) that the slot machine game was made so random because of the quality of the reward (it’s possible to earn up to five extra lives at it), and because they had played around with life-granting minigames before. Doki Doki Panic, which got reskinned for overseas markets at Super Mario Bros. 2, has a slot machine game, “Bonus Chance,” that appears after every level. With good timing and practice Bonus Chance can be mastered, earning up to five extra lives for every coin plucked in the level. I have managed to abuse that game to earn so many extra lives that the game ran out of numbers for the tens’ digit of the life counter, sending it into letters of the alphabet. There’s certainly no danger of that in Super Mario Bros. 3.

The second minigame has the player match cards from a grid of 24. Each pair of cards found earns a modest prize, from as little as 10 coins up to a single extra life. Most of the awards are powerups for the player’s inventory. The player gets two tries, but if they don’t clear the board it’ll carry over to the next time they play. Attempts at the card matching board appear every 80,000 points the player earns, making it the only Super Mario game to actually reward scoring lots of points.

The card matching game is one of the most interesting minigames in all of the Mario series. There’s only eight layouts for the cards, the second and fifth cards of the middle row are frequently both the 1UP card, and the last three cards on the bottom row are always Mushroom, Flower and Star, in that order. This means the minigame can be mastered, and even if you don’t memorize all eight layouts to deduce where the prizes are, knowing the three cards that never change usually means it won’t take more than two or three attempts to clear the board, netting lots of powerups.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained looks into why the card matching game works the way it does, and discovered some interesting things. There’s actually code in the game to do a much more thorough randomization of the cards, but it goes unutilized. The full details are in the video, but in summary:

  • The board always begins in the same state,
  • the last three cards on the bottom row are left unchanged, probably on purpose,
  • the first way the other cards are scrambled shifts them one space in sequence, and is only done one or three times, three times in total,
  • and the other method of scrambling them, which involves swapping around three specific cards, is done exactly once between each shift.

The only variation in the steps is from the choice of whether to shift once or thrice, each of those three times. Thus, there are only 23 possible layouts, that is, 8. There is a loop in there to potentially vary the number of times the cards are swapped (the second way to scramble the cards), but the way it’s written the loop is never used, and the cards are swapped only once each time.

All of the layouts for Maro 3’s card matching minigame, from the Nintendo Power guide. “The key is concentration” alludes to the traditional card game “Concentration,” which is played in a similar manner.

What I also find interesting is, this isn’t the only Nintendo to use a minigame that involves mixing up hidden prizes. Kid Icarus’ Treasure Rooms also have a limited number of layouts, which vary for each of the game’s three worlds. The player can open pots in the room to collect minor items, but if they open the wrong pot early, before opening all the others, they find the God of Poverty, and lose everything they’ve found. If they can save that pot for last, though, the final pot will instead contain a pretty good prize, which can even be a Credit Card item that cannot be obtained otherwise.

The way they’re designed, both Mario 3’s card-matching game and Kid Icarus’s Treasure Rooms have tells, specific spots that can be revealed to identify which of the limited number of boards that version of the game is using, and that the player can use to get all the prizes. Also, there are Nintendo-published guides that reveal all the layouts, in Nintendo Power for Kid Icarus (recounted on this charmingly old-school webpage), and the Nintendo Power guide for Super Mario Bros. 3 (on page 10), so Nintendo had to have been aware of the limited nature of the board layouts, and may have actually intended them to be defeated with a good strategy.

SMB3 Roulette & Card Matching Games Explained (Youtube, 20 minutes)