The Flipside of Gaming
Still in a low-effort mode due to upcoming events out here, but we love gaming esoterica, so here’s Hunter R’s newest video on Animal Crossing, here about the Wii version, City Folk. (14 minutes)
Highlights are details on City Folk’s letter scoring system, music in the game that can be heard but is really hard to listen to, a couple of softlock bugs, and info on how Nintendo distributed custom items via WiiConnect 24, and its unexpected relevance to The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
The gold standard of game breakdowns continues to be PannenKoek’s extremely detailed and approachable examinations of Super Mario 64, but there’s other people out there are also nerding out excessively over games.
Suuper W‘s makes videos about several different Mario games, but Mario Kart is their primary beat. They recently explained how Mario Kart DS detects when you’ve hit a wall. It’s worth a look if you want to either how the detection works, how it can be abused, or, just possibly, both. (14 minutes)
Also of interest is a video they’ve done about “Wall Assisted Super Bouncing,” a Mario Kart DS technique that can cause you to game big air and leap over barriers under the right conditions. It’s 11 minutes, and even if (as is likely) you’re not in the Mario Kart DS TAS speedrunning scene, it may be interesting for its look at the specifics of MKDS’s engine.
There are quite a number of refreshing things about the Atari 2600 Technical Wiki. There’s its subtitle, “Woodgrain Wizardry,” which is excellent. Its dedication to a 47-year-old game console. There’s it being a wiki that isn’t being hosted on damnable ubiquitous Fandom. Its direct writing style, which gets right to the point of each page. It’s also not a Youtube video, which is sort of okay if you have a Premium account or a working adblocker, but a hellscape if you don’t. Its the kind of page Google Search de-prioritizes if you’re not doing a web-only search, and even if you do that, sometimes gets skipped over.
It is true, this one’s for hardcore geeks and programmers only. I love reading about stuff like how to do large 48-pixel graphic displays, useful for score readouts or title screens, even if I probably won’t ever use that information myself. Or on Bank Switching, which reveals that, since there’s nothing in the system’s tiny cartridges’ ROM space that indicates which bank switching scheme is being used, emulators scan through the executable image looking for signature bytes to determine when to map parts of it to the processor’s address space, and homebrew games try to give them appropriate hints so they’ll work smoothly.
There’s a page, Introduction to Processor Hardware, that gives us the surprising information that some EPROM chips, when used with the 2600, may act unpredictably when used in a dark room. That quality esoterica right there.