So, why does this happen? The precise details are in the video, but here’s a summary.

When you’re holding an axe, the game is not discriminating about which A button presses cause it to degrade—or, rather, its damage value will increase. If you hit objects other than trees, it’ll pick up three times as many damage points. But you can do other things that use the A button, and if an axe is in hand, its also take on damage.

There are actually eight different axe objects, that are switched between when eight points of damage is taken. (The more damaged versions have slightly different appearances.) The damage counter isn’t actually tied to the axe: it’s a separate count that’s counts for all axes. (Meaning, if you have multiple axes and try to spread out the wear between them, technically only the axe that you’re holding when you take the eighth damage point really gets harmed.) The value is also not saved when you save the game; if you hit trees seven times with an axe, then save and reload, the wear will be forgotten.

If you do something with the A button while the axe is in hand, but it doesn’t strike an object that might cause it to break, it’ll keep gaining damage. If you’re facing an object that isn’t a tree, like the Message Board sign, it’ll even gain three as much. But the check that switches to the next-most-damaged axe type only happens when the axe actually hits something. (It also happens if you open doors with an axe in hand!)

The counter to check if the axe should take wear is a single byte interpreted as a signed value, so, if you can get it to 128 or higher, the high bit is set, so the C library code used for the game’s comparisons will consider it to be a negative number. 43 x 3 is 129, or -126. You can then keep using the axe over and over until the number turns positive again, at 0, or until you save the game and reset the counter anyway.

By the way, to bring this to the realm of things I have personal knowledge of… Animal Crossing New Horizons doesn’t have a similar bug (as far as I know at least), but there is a different unexpected aspect of its tool-breaking. If a timer is running, like from hitting a rock for Bells or from participating in a round of a fishing or bug-catching tournament, tools won’t break until the timer expires, even if they exceed their durability limit. It’ll count the damage, but it won’t actually break the tool until the timer runs out. If you don’t use the tool in a way that might cause it to break, then it won’t, not until you next use it. If you’ve kept track of how much wear it’s taken, you can then sell it at Nooks and get some of the value for it.

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This kind of hack isn’t of the type like people claiming to “install” Windows to a Nintendo DS, but in fact are using DOSbox running on the DS. They get a bit of credit for coming up with a clever solution, but it’s not running on the metal, in the parlance. This is about actually running literal Microsoft NT on the actual Nintendo Gamecube/Wii, with no emulation layers or similar shenanigan interposed between.

The first one is from “Spawn Wave,” who has the Bright Young Broadcaster style to his video, meaning, his records from a dark room of equipment, his camera close to his face, he speaks loudly and squeezes in that like and/or subscribe prompt early, and generally tries to impress personality into his video. Mind, I don’t think all of this has to be bad, and Spawn Wave is a lot less obnoxious than many other YouPotatoes I’ve seen. There’s a blessed lack of sound effects or swoopy editing. His video’s only nine minutes long, so if you’re pressed for time, this is the one to watch.

I tend to prefer videos more like Michael MJD’s overview, which is also much longer at 31 minutes. He’s installing on a Wii, which is more powerful and performs better, and doesn’t need hardware mods. His is of the Hands Intruding From Offscreen school of video, but he’s more laid-back, and with that much time can fit more information without having to squeeze it in. This is better for people wanting to positively luxuriate in the process of installing NT4 to systems not intended for it.

The question of why, oh why, someone would do this, must remain unanswered. Some people just like making computers do weird things. It’s an odd form of entertainment, but entirely valid. Now, when will someone get Linux running on CoreWar?

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The e-Reader uses a variation of the technology used in QR codes. QR codes, surprisingly date back as far as 1994. Old-time internet layabouts like myself remember the CueCat, a special barcode scanner that was given out for free, under the assumption that they could make money off of them from advertisers using their tech to encode URLs to their sites in their print ads, then users could scan them with their CueCats to jump immediately to their sites. Yes, this was a business model that people once thought could work. Maybe it could have at one point: that’s the major use case for QR codes now.

The e-Reader was rather different. A Gameboy Advance peripheral released in Japan in 2001, and the US in 2002, it could scan tiny dot patterns printed on playing card size pieces of cardboard. Whereas QR codes are intended for small amounts of data like URLs, a single e-Reader card could hold 2,112 bytes of data. The hardware itself had a ROM built-in that contained an NES emulator, so one of the things that could be distributed, on small decks cards, were smaller NES games like the black box series. I had an e-Reader myself back then, and while it’s long since misplaced and probably lost for good, I still have an officially-released pack of cards somewhere with Balloon Fight on it, and also the weird e-Reader variant of Mario Party, which I think I’ve only ever had the chance to play once.

The e-Reader was one of Nintendo’s shorter-lived play experiments, and didn’t last long. But one of the most interesting releases for it was a large sequence of Animal Crossing cards. There were hundreds of these cards, and they were kind of like an early version of the current-day Animal Crossing amiibo cards. It’s amazing there were so many, because the hardware requirements were significant: you needed a Gamecube and GC Animal Crossing disk, of course, and the e-Reader, and a Gameboy Advance, and a GBA/GC link cable. And the cards themselves, of course.

The cards could be used to get all kinds of items in your Animal Crossing village, depending on the card. The amazing thing about the cards is that they seem like they’d be the kind of thing that would have been quickly cracked and turned into a way to obtain arbitrary objects, like the never-released Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda NES items in Animal Crossing, but were in fact only broken fairly recently.

The 11-minute video linked here explains how they worked and how they were cracked, and also links to a GitHub repository with program that can be used to generate your own cards. But Hunter R. has been on this beat for a while, and has two other videos on the subject you can peruse if you wish, on generating custom villagers with cards (12 minutes), and generating Super Mario and Zelda NES items (18 minutes). The villager one is interesting because you can make arbitrary villagers with it, with appearances and names not among the ones included on the disk, although only using the Japanese version of the e-Reader. Even you don’t have the magic combination of gadgets to make practical use of them, they’re interesting watches to understand how the e-Reader worked, and how it was, eventually, exploited.

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I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I.I .I.I.I.I.I.I.

Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series has a lot of weird systems in them. Some games wear the grass down according to character walking patterns; all the games have the “Stalk Market,” a risky way to make a lot of money; most of the games have a lost-and-found; and so on.

A system that was in the first game, and I’m not sure was ever adapted for later games (but then it might have been) was letter-writing, not just to other players in the same village, but to the villagers. They’d save the letters you wrote them and show them off to other players if they moved to another town, and even write you back. Of course, parsing and intelligently responding to any text, no matter the language, was beyond computers of the time (and despite what AI enthusiasts will tell you, still isn’t), so the game has to fake it in some way. But, how?

Well, what is the purpose of writing letters to characters in the game? It gives villagers something interesting to show people when they move to their villages, and, it’s a roleplaying exercise for the writer, a way to pretend the animal denizens of your town are real people and not simulated game mechanics present to make the game seem less empty.

Both of these design goals work best if the person writing the letter actually writes real letters, and not random jumbles of characters, so Animal Crossing has a mechanism to reward players for writing what appear to be real letters, and not placeholder gibberish, and its system of ranking text to attempt to reward actual letter-like writing is quite complex. It looks for punctuation that looks generally appropriate, capital letters after sentence-ending punctuation, triples of characters that commonly appear in English, and sequences of characters followed by spaces that approximate the word lengths of English. Of special interest: these are elements that have to be tweaked by language, and so they pose a special challenge to localization.

Hunter R., popular Animal Crossing Youtuber, released a video that explains exactly how GC Animal Crossing scores letters written to villagers. As it turns out, the text that scores the very best looks a lot like that in the preamble to this post, up above. Go figure! Here is his description (10 minutes):

How Villagers “Read” Your Letters In Animal Crossing (Youtube, 10m)

EDIT: My mistake! Originally the villager-friendly message near the beginning of this post was missing a trailing period, which would cost it some points when brought under the exacting animal eye. It has been corrected.

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Another Nintendo post. The company’s tight-lippedness, which has intensified since the days of Iwata Asks, lends itself to fan speculation about nearly everything, and part of that everything is whatever happened to Peach’s minister, Toadsworth. In Japanese he’s キノじい, Kinojii, which I think implies he’s second in rank behind Peach in the Mushroom Kingdom hierarchy. Or was.

Toadsworth was introduced as a third in the vacation party, with Mario and Peach, in Super Mario Sunshine, likely as a kind of chaperone to make sure it wasn’t Peach and Mario taking a personal trip together, which I’m sure would have been a scandal in the fungal broadsheets, their ruler traveling alone with a swarthy Italian. The kooparazzi would be all over it.

Throughout the Gamecube era, Toadsworth was a prominent element of Mario lore, racking up appearances in many games. He was in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Mario Kart DoubleDash, several Mario sports, and especially in the Mario & Luigi games, which fleshed out the character more than any other source.

Piantapedia on Youtube made an 11-minute video exploring Toadsworth’s history. It contains the information that Toadsworth was explicitly removed from the Super Mario Bros. Movie, replaced with a character known as Toad General, which is as good a sign as any that Nintendo is purposely not providing the character any more exposure, except perhaps in remakes like the one of Thousand-Year Door.

Isn’t it odd? Nintendo, when given opportunities to expand upon Mario lore, whenever they take a strong stab at it, often walks it back to the baseline of the original Super Mario Bros. They seem reluctant to meaningfully develop the Mario universe. Sometimes this happens in immediately consecutive games: remember how Super Mario Galaxy 2 abandoned nearly everything from the first Super Mario Galaxy, pretending it didn’t exist, when presenting its story?

The fact that TYD wasn’t rewritten to remove Toadsworth indicates the character isn’t poisonous to Nintendo, necessarily, but neither do they seem interested in giving him any more exposure. For shame! Who knows what Peach and Mario might get up to behind closed doors without Kinojii to watch over things?

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Reading the back of the case made it clear something else was going on. Amazing Island was actually an early form of creativity game, like Drawn to Life, or Spore for that matter. Instead of collecting pre-made monsters, you made your own! Starting from one of a number of skeleton types, you used the Gamecube controller to draw shapes around it, that the game would then animate to bring your creation to life. Not a bad concept!

Worse was the execution, what you’d actually do with your creatures after they were made. Ideally the game would somehow use the contours and colors you attached to your newborn monstrosity to give it statistics, and then you could command it into full-animated battle against other monsters. Instead, you were given a variety of minigames to use your monster in, which didn’t have the same appeal. Rather than having Pokemon-style moves, they played a number of variations on volleyball, or racing, or some such.

Youtuber Camobot put the game through its paces in a 14-minute review. Here it is:

I think the video has its faults, but it mostly serves its purpose of presenting a noble experiment that never got a rerelease, and might earn a cult following today if it were. I wonder especially, if the Dreamcast hadn’t failed, if Amazing Island might have seen release on it, or on its successor if one had happened. It didn’t seem to sell too well on the Gamecube, and it probably would have done even worse on the PS2 or Xbox.

The failure of games like Amazing Island at market is why most games are largely similar by-the-numbers products nowadays, that don’t take risks but are made to ensure a modest yet predictable profit. This is why, when you see a game that you might like that looks like it might really try something different, you should take the plunge, if you are able, and check it out. Until developers are better incentivized for taking chances making novel and unique games, they’ll have to stick to churning out the bland gruel that still moves copies, and no one really likes that, not the players, and not even the devs.

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It’s not completely positive, as they point out the game’s high encounter rate and the slowness of battle, but gosh there’s a lot of awesome things in Skies of Arcadia that don’t seem to have ever been revisited in other games.

The main overworld is one in which you have an airship and fly around a world that has floating islands but no real ground. Sure, that’s been done by other people, and more than once, and fairly recently too, but SoA brought some really interesting nuance to it that gave players good reason to explore, like interesting optional subquests. You could find mysterious locations out in the world and sell them to the Explorer’s Guild for extra money, but only if you’re quick enough to stay ahead of rival ships also looking for them. There was also an alternate form of combat, ship-to-ship (and sometimes ship-to-huge-monster) battles, that played out very differently from the JRPG norm. All the extra things to do gave the game this weird veneer of simulationism, which I always find interesting, even if it was largely an illusion.

Skies of Arcadia was originally a Dreamcast release, one of only two substantive JRPGs made for that system (the other was Grandia II), and fell victim to the Dreamcast’s short life and subsequent exit from console manufacturing by Sega. It did get a remake for the Gamecube, but that was the last we’ve seen of Skies of Arcadia, other than character cameos in Sonic racing games.

JRPG Junkie: Back to the Backlog – Skies of Arcadia

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F-Zero 99 gets its aesthetic from the original SNES game, which is nice, but also feels like a bit of a waste. Nintendo created 26 new characters for F-Zero X, and the Amusement Vision team at Sega (creators of the Monkey Ball series!) made some more for F-Zero GX. And the cool thing is, none of the characters feel like an afterthought. Every one of these weirdos could star in their own video game. F-Zero GX gives all of them voice acting in their endings, and even their own theme song!

Most significantly, every F-Zero GX playable character has a short movie that’s unlocked if you complete all the Grand Prix leagues with them on Master difficulty. But that is a huge feat! F-Zero GX is ludicrously difficult even on lower difficulties, and some of the cars are more suited to driving well than others.

Of course, on Youtube you can find a compilation of all the pilot profile movies. Many of them are really silly. Here they are:

And as an extra, here’s a playlist of the 41 character theme songs from F-Zero GX:

F-Zero GX: All Pilot Profile Movies (Youtube, 28 minutes)

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They used to have, for a surprisingly long time really, a set of networked Battletech pods that some people would dutifully bring every year, with N64-level graphics, that had a dedicated following. The pods were made up in an immersive fashion, in a way that suggested perhaps a connection to the old Battletech Centers, which appear to still be in operation. I hear those stopped coming to DragonCon due to COVID and have yet to return. Weirdly, the pen-and-paper version of Battletech itself, which was almost dead for a long while, made it to DragonCon this year in huge fashion.

They have a board game area where for a $10 fee you can check out a game to play for a while. Sadly I found that area completely unusable this year, despite bringing two of my own board games (Le Havre and Caylus) to play there: its proximity to the music arcade game area (post forthcoming on that) made it impossible to be heard except by almost shouting. There were other tables, but also a lot of competition between Magic, dexterity games, demos, figure painting, Warhammer, Battletech, and a big area devoted to “US Army E-sports,” a phrase that fills me with sadness to type.

Also on the gaming floor was an area where one could check out PC and console games and systems and play them. I found their selection a bit lacking; I have a few personal systems I had emailed them about bringing, but as in the past when I’ve reached out about such things, I never got a response. I suppose that’s understandable, but it’d have been nice to let people play Dreamcast or Saturn games from my own collection.

The console gaming group ran three “challenge run” tournaments where you could try to complete objectives on NES games for prizes. I entered all three (finish all the levels in Super Mario Bros 3 World 1, finish any five levels of Mega Man 2, and a Link to the Past randomizer) but despite playing fairly well, by my standards at least, didn’t win any of them. Pretty good game players among DragonCon’s visitors this year!

Somewhere at the convention was a setup for Artemis Bridge Simulator, which could be thought of as a more elaborate and serious-minded version of Spaceteam. Its location didn’t lie tangent to my con travels this year, but it was mentioned in the con materials. (I suspect it was upstairs somewhere in the Westin.)

I had thought to bring my 2DS and see if I could get some Street Passes, with big conventions like DragonCon being one of the few places left that one could hope to get significant activity, but the odds that more than a handful had thought to both bring their 3DS-type systems and have them on their persons and in sleep mode through the con seem to be slim in 2023. Anyway, I didn’t bring mine.

So now we come to the Gamecube “panels,” which were actually just a bunch of Gamecubes and Wiis set up with classic Gamecube games, along with some entertaining display decoration. No speakers, no podiums, just a bunch of seats, systems, players, and some staff.

There were four of these this year, each late at night in the Westin Augusta ballroom, themed after multiplayer, Super Mario, Zelda and Smash Bros, in order. Really though, they all were primarily multiplayer themed. I showed up for two nights, the first and Zelda ones, and on Zelda night I mostly spent the time showing people how to finish NES The Legend of Zelda, giving directions for getting through the overworld and dungeons from memory. The people there expressed concern over the game’s difficulty, and how many of them couldn’t complete it, as a kid or even now; evidently they don’t watch many speedrunners.

There were the predictable Melee players, of course. Super Smash Bros Melee’s influence on the series, and on gaming as a whole, is unmistakable. After all, each Nintendo console since then has had to have support for Gamecube controllers, in some way, just to allow Melee masters to have their favorite playstyles, and Nintendo keeps making (or at least licensing) the production of new Gamecube-compatible controllers specifically for that scene.

But my favorite game at the Gamecube panels had to have been Kirby Air Ride, in City Trial mode. I’ve mentioned my fondness for this game here before, but to give a brief refresher: multiple Kirbys zoom around on Warp Stars, whose speeds rival those of the cars in F-Zero, through a large (though not too large) city area, searching for powerups, and boxes that contain more powerups. Players can interact with each other, and can change vehicles. Random events occur. After a set time, they’re all thrown into a random event (from a large selection) with the customized vehicle they made during the game. It’s a surprising amount of fun, and I was pleased to find other players there at least as fanatical about City Trial as I was. I think it’s one of the best multiplayer games on the system.

I had brought a few multiplayer Gamecube games of my own, including Wario Ware: Mega Party Games ($900 on Amazon!) and Ribbit King ($362), but as with the console group they were uninterested. Understandable of course, I brought them along only in the off chance. Just, slightly sad.

Here are pictures I took of the Gamecube event:

Next time, a look at the many music games they had this year. I think that’s the extent of my game-related pictures, so please be patient a little longer!

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A good old-fashioned website! It’s hope to information on the construction of a wide variety of console platforms! Docs on the NES, the Sega Master System, the PC Engine (a.k.a. Turbografx 16), the Mega Drive (a.k.a. Genesis), Gameboy, SNES, Saturn, Playstation, Virtual Boy (yes), Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Playstation 2, GBA, Gamecube, Xbox, DS, PSP, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii and Wii U.

The Copetti site: Architecture of Consoles

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One of the best Kirby games isn’t a traditional Kirby game at all. Long before Kirby and the Forgotten Land finally worked out how the game should work in three dimensions, there was Kirby Air Ride, a Gamecube racing game that’s so weird. Kirby tools around on the Warp Stars that are his trademark ride through a number of courses at speeds usually only seen in an F-Zero game. There’s a variety of stars that can be ridden, more to unlock, it was the second game in which Meta Knight was fully playable, and the first where King Dedede was (unless you count short sequences in Kirby 64).

Kirby Air Ride had three modes, but they all felt a bit half-baked except for one. The standard Air Ride mode wasn’t bad, but could only be played one course at a time, with no overarching mode that connected them. That’s right, it didn’t have a “Grand Prix” mode. And the other competitors were only differently-colored Kirbys (Kirbies?) anyway. The courses were pretty good, but it didn’t give you much to keep you playing except for its checklist (which we’ll get to).

There was also a special racing mode that took place from an overhead view, on special one-screen courses, like Atari’s Sprint games, which felt even less substantive than the standard racing mode.

But the reason Kirby Air Ride is special, and the reason I still have my copy of the game after all these years, is City Trial, which is one of the most engaging racing game experiences I’ve ever seen. It’s really good. Not because it has any overarching structure the other modes lack (other than its checkbox screen). But because it’s so novel; no other game I can think of provides the kind of gameplay that City Trial does, unless you count Smash Run from the 3DS version of Super Smash Bros., which was also made by Masahiro Sakauri. But even it isn’t really the same thing, because you can’t interact with the other players during it!

City Trial puts from one to four players, either human-played or computer-controlled, in a free-roaming city area. It’s not really a “race” at all. While the city is, spatially, quite large, the players’ warp stars are so fast that it only takes about 20 or so seconds from one end to the other, and the game also keeps you appraised of where the other Kirbys are with on-screen indicators and a map in the corner. Over a period of between three to seven minutes, you zoom around trying to collect powerups for your star. They come in a variety of types: Top Speed, Acceleration, Charge, Turning, Gliding, Weight and more, all taking the form of 2D icons scattered randomly around the city.

As you collect icons, each provides a small permanent (for the duration of the match) improvement in that one area of your star’s performance. Some are in boxes, which must be broken apart either by colliding with them repeatedly or spin attacks. Some of them are gray-colored, which are permanent power-downs.

Throughout the time limit, you seek out and collect as many as you can. If there is a maximum stat you can reach I’ve never seen it; I think it can go at least as high as 20 icon’s worth, but it’s nearly impossible to get that high. It’s gratifying to feel your default “Compact Star” get steadily better and better as you snatch powerups. But also, there are other vehicles throughout the city, and you can get off your default star at any time by holding down on the control stick and the A button and board another one. All of the varied stars from Air Ride mode (some of which aren’t really stars at all) are present, and they all control really differently from each other. Some even have special properties, it’s not a case at all of them just having different stats. When you switch stars, you get to take all of your collected powerups with you, though if you have a lot you’ll drop some, and have to spend a few seconds picking them back up again.

The amount of care that went into this one mode is almost shocking. You can attack other players and steal their powerups! You can even destroy their warp star, and force them to wander around on foot to find a replacement! Some of the traditional Kirby copy abilities can be found and used against the other players! There’s random events, with a lot of variety, that can happen, providing different dangers, or opportunities. You can sail out over the ocean on your hovering star. If you get enough height, you can fly over the invisible border wall and explore even more ocean.

You can also collect Legendary Machine parts, which are hidden in some of the boxes. The Hydra, from the more recent Super Smash Bros. games, is a direct reference to this. If you manage to find all three parts, to either the Hydra (the green one) or the Dragoon (the red one), you get to ride it. They’re both ludicrously overpowered, although they can also be difficult to control.

The real mark of genius in this mode is what happens when time runs out. The game shows a chart with everyone’s vehicle stats on it, then throws all the players into a random event. Your vehicle’s stats may make this event easy or hard! If you end up in an event where you have to attack enemies or aim to collide with targets, you might find yourself wishing you had laid off getting all those speed-ups, but plenty of the events are races too, including all of the race courses from Air Ride mode. How do you know what kind of event it coming up? There are two ways: sometimes, during the City Trial portion, the game will drop you a text hint as a message. (Hilariously, once in a great while it lies.) Or else, if you don’t like the randomness, you can choose broadly what kind of event will happen in the game settings.

Whichever player comes out on top in the event, the victory is short-lived. There is no huge victory celebration, no advantage to be gained. The game doesn’t even save player profiles. But City Trial mode is entertaining enough that we don’t really end up caring much? It’s even fun to play against computer opponents.

Each of the three modes in Kirby Air Ride has a “checklist,” a grid of squares, each representing some accomplishment, or at least occurrence, that can happen in its game. This is the closest thing Air Ride has to progression. If you’ve seen the Challenges in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, this is the same kind of thing. All of the challenges are hidden at first, but when you unlock one, the requirements for the ones around it are revealed to you. Some of the boxes unlock things, like new events, being able to play as Meta Knight or Dedede in the practice mode, or more Kirby colors. But mostly it’s just something to give obsessive players (like myself) something to work for. In a racing game without even a Grand Prix mode (seriously what is up with that?), I’ll take what I can get.

One more cool thing? Until fairly recently (and ignoring that non-canonical anime series), City Trial was our only glimpse into what day-to-day life was like in Dream Land. This city is evidently where Kirby and his friends live and play (I don’t think any of them have a job). There’s skyscrapers, a river, an ocean, an underground region, mass transit rails, a golf course (overseen by Wispy Woods), a castle and a volcano, and even “dilapidated houses,” which the players can demolish with their vehicles. I guess even Planet Popstar has a seedy part of its towns.

Apparently, day-to-day life in Kirbyland is spent in endless vehicular combat sessions. I’d like to say that I’m surprised, but for some reason, I’m not.

If you’d like to see how this works out in play, here’s an hour and 54 minutes of City Trial play, without commentary, on Youtube:

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For context, it was near the end of the Gamecube’s life, immediately before the release of the Wii, and the early years of the Nintendo DS. Objects glimpsed during the stroll include various consoles, records of Nintendo’s collaboration with the Starlight Children’s Foundation, Pokemon merchandise, Nintendo awards, some arcade units (including a glitched Mario Bros. cabinet), a Virtual Boy, various character statuettes, old playing cards, a capsule timeline of Nintendo history, and various games for sale at the time. It seems that the museum also functions as a retail space for employees.

Exploring Nintendo of America’s Employee-Only Museum (Youtube, 28 minutes)

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One of the less-remembered things about Pikmin 2 was that it had actual product placement in it. Many of the treasures you found were outright commercial objects, modeled and textured in the game, some with vaguely promotional names, like “Courage Reactor” for Duracell Battery, or “Quenching Emblem” for a 7-Up bottle cap. Even the European and Japanese versions had these, although they reflected products from their territories instead.

Presumably because the licensing deals for these objects have expired, the Switch 2 version of Pikmin 2 uses different, more generic items in place of the trademarked originals. The replacements are an interesting lot. Where they could have just removed the old textures and replaced them with solid colors, they put in fake ingredients lists (too small to read), “Established 1920” notices, fake slogans and logos, notices of product quantity in Imperial units with metric equivalent, and more. You’d almost believe Olimar was finding real goods from Earth, ones that you just haven’t heard of. The tip-off is, the names of the replacement products are just slightly too generic. “Coconut Water” and “Night Lip Balm” are descriptive but generic, and so but really able to be trademarked. They’re a nice batch of fake brands though. For “Pineapple Fresh Slices,” they even made up a realistic-looking US-style Nutrition Facts label!

The differences have been recorded in a video by ModenXP on Youtube, embedded below:

And now, as an exercise in overkill, here’s a list of all the old and new versions, and interesting things about the replacements:

27 Treausres that Changed in Pikmin 2 on Switch (Youtube, 14 minutes)

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It was such a distinctive feature that some people were a bit upset that it wasn’t included in the recent remastered version for the Switch, especially since it was included in the remake of Metroid Prime, in the Metroid Prime Collection released for the Wii. What happened?

Youtube channel KIWI TALKZ spoke with Jack Mathews, one of the programmers of the original version, in a Youtube video, where they revealed that the beam lighting effect was designed around a specific feature of the Gamecube hardware, that made it nearly free. They theorize that it could have been included in the Switch’s version, but it would have been much more costly there, especially at its 60 fps target. The Switch was designed, either cleverly or infamously depending on your point of view, around a mobile graphics chip, that was never intended to wow with effects, even those available to 22-year-old hardware.

It is interesting though, to think there are things the Gamecube’s now-ancient 3D chips can do easily that the Switch has trouble with. Mind you, the Switch does target a much higher resolution than the Gamecube, not 1080p but still 900, which is a lot more than the Gamecube which was aimed at standard def televisions. But on the other armored hand, it has been over two decades. Ah well.

Why Beam Lighting Was Removed In Metroid Prime Remastered (KIWI TALKZ on Youtube, 6 minutes)

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How many of you had the original Gamecube Animal Crossing? I did back in college, and it was quite popular with me and my roommates! One of them picked up her own memory card, to have her own town, where she build up a fortune in bells. She was kind of obsessed for awhile.

Gamecube Animal Crossing existed in the days of the early web, but at a time where people were a bit less determined when it came to investigating a game’s code for information on how its systems worked. As such the schoolyard rumor mill was still a large part of the game’s experience, and all kinds of outlandish lore would get traded around. Of course that still happens today (and misinformation is rampant in general), but if someone wants to know the real scoop, that information is out there for the diligent. (Hell, I wrote an ebook on the very topic of Animal Crossing New Horizons strategies and secrets.)

Youtuber LSuperSonicQ (with help from Chuggaconroy) made a video investigating many of the rumors surrounding the original game. You should watch the video, but seeing as it’s 20 minutes long, here’s a rundown:

• Brutus the cursed villager: does not exist in the game’s code.
• Deathwing the cursed fish: does not exist in the game’s code.
• Villagers meeting each other and changing moods: outcome depends on the personalities of the villagers.
• Rare dialogue: often the result of talking to a villager when they’re in a mood.
• Angering villagers: hit them with tools repeatedly, push them around a lot, or talk with one many times in a short period.
• NES games “Forbidden Four”: Ice Climber, Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda. Ice Climber and Mario Bros. were released via eReader and are difficult & expensive to access now. At first included Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out as well, but it was distributed by a code generator (that’s now sadly defunct).
• Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda: were never released by any means, and are only accessible via Action Replay or other hacking means. (Although it is claimed that this code generator can generate them.)
• The NES item: does function, but only plays rom files that are on the memory card, and Nintendo never distributed any! Roms can be put onto a card with file transfer methods and played with GCAC’s NES emulator.
• Gyroid boxing: the rumor that gyroids can be made to fight in the boxing ring furniture items is false.
• The Ringside Seating wallpaper: the crowd cheers if you ring the Judge’s Bell while it’s up!
• Master Sword: cannot be pulled from its pedestal. The Super Star, however, will make you flash if interacted with.
• Password system: can be used to obtain items that are not ordinarily obtainable, like villager event clothing and special stationery, through means like the code generator I linked above.
• Comic Book, Glasses Case, Pokemon Pikachu: Ordinarily part of villager lost item quests. They can be generated themselves with password generators and placed in houses, but they have no models there, and so are invisible.
• Tom Nook sleeping in his shop: unviewable in the US version, but in the Japanese version there is a secret means to open his shop late a night, by tapping your shovel on his shop’s window three times.
• Working for Nook out of your uniform: it works! Just show up for work out of uniform. He’ll react, but let you do it anyway.
• Mr. Resetti’s surveillance center: unavailable in US version. In Japanese version can be found by breaking a cracked rock and jumping down a hole. While there, Mr. Resetti and his brother Don’s feet are visible. They are not Digletts! Some sequels made the surveillance center able to be visited even in the US. (New Horizons, sadly, is not one of them.) Described at 10:32.
• Resetti’s music: there is a code that replaces all the game’s music with Resetti’s theme until the game is reset.
• Post Office: there are messages for sending letters to players with full mailboxes, and for writing a letter to a villager but waiting to send it until after they leave. The trick of writing a letter to a villager and keeping it in your inventory so they won’t leave does not work.
• Police Station: Copper has animations for interacting with some visitors (Joan and Wendell are mentioned), and is known to fall asleep at 2 AM!
• The Dump: Nothing special known.
• Beta Map: Through a process described in the video, it’s possible to be sent to a testing map through normal gameplay. It’s shown off in the video. It’s impossible to escape from it though without resetting. It’s described at 15:58.
• Secret K.K. Slider songs: K.K. Song, Two Days Ago, and I Love You, can only be obtained by asking for them by name. (Each successive sequel made the previous game’s unlisted songs “official,” but added their own unlisted songs.)
• Three songs, Forest Life, My Place and To The Edge, can only be played randomly if K.K. Slider doesn’t recognize a request, and cannot be obtained at all in GCAC.
• The Whale: I’ve seen this one personally! There is a gigantic fish shadow that can be seen randomly, and very rarely, on the boat ride to the Gameboy Advance island. It cannot be caught. Here’s more info.

Everything You Never Knew About Animal Crossing for GameCube feat. Chuggaconroy (Youtube, 20 minutes)

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The way they explain it is that the game has a number of “world layers” which determine what is spawned in each area when it’s loaded. Which layer is active when a room is loaded is determined by a single bit in the save. That, plus some basic stats like health and ammo, and the record of object scans, all take up very little memory when bit-packed.

If Metroid Prime’s save file were 59 bytes long, that would mean it had 472 bits to work with. The passwords used by the original Metroid only stored 144 bits of data!

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The last “major” F-Zero game released was back in the Gamecube, the sterling, yet extraordinarily challenging, F-Zero GX. What tends to be less remembered was it was a dual release. At around the same time, Sega released on Nintendo’s TRIFORCE hardware an arcade version called F-Zero AX. In the US arcades were pretty moribund around that time, so it tends to be a lot less recognized on these shores. The AX machine bore a Gamecube memory card slot so that players could take their save files to the arcade unit and use their custom vehicles there, and take data from that version back home. The AX version also has tracks and vehicles not in the GX version.

What tends to be even less well known is that nearly the entire arcade version of F-Zero AX is right there on the Gamecube disk! Back in 2021, Romhacker Elfor constructed a patch for the Gamecube version that, if played in an emulator or somehow made readable by GC hardware, can boot directly into that version of the game.

There are some differences from the arcade version in this revealed version of game, many of them related to music tracks left off the disk. More recently, Anthony Ryuki made a patch to restore those tracks, and bring the Gamecube AX version even closer to the arcade experience.

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Greetings, humans! Here is the gaming news I could glean from decrypting your internet broadcasts from my flying saucer floating above your atmosphere!

Jordan Devore, Destructoid: Rogue Legacy 2 Drops Vertigo From Its Traits List. You see, each character you play in that game is part of a lineage of characters, and they have semi-random traits. One of those traits flipped the screen upside-down during play. Or it did. Now it’s not in the game anymore!

Oisin Kunhke, Gamebyte tells us about a word-in-progress Breath of the Wild Randomizer mod!

Brad Linder of Liliputing notes of a new version of a three-key keyboard made by Stack Overflow.

Wololo (?) of Wololo (??) tells us that homebrew fans are reviving Playstation Home!

Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica lets us know that Nvidia is facing scrutiny from the FCC for inaccurately representing how cryptocurrency mining boosted the sales of their graphics hardware.

Sam Medley of NotebookCheck tells of AltStore, a sneaky way around Apple’s App Store for distributing software they’d rather you not use. I hesitate to speculate on how long this loophole will last, but I’m no fan of hardware lockouts and use limitations, so it’s nice while it lasts!

More news from the orchard. MacRumors talks with Feral about porting games to Apple’s new M1 hardware and the difficulties it has faced with their graphics.

Always awesome Kyle Orland at Ars Technica has an article with a headline too fun to paraphrase: Eve Online fans literally cheer Microsoft Excel features at annual Fanfest.

Ian Evenden at Tom’s Hardware talks about HoloISO, a port of SteamOS 3 that fans have gotten to run on devices other than the Steam Deck. Valve hasn’t released it officially for other hardware yet!

Jay Fingas at Engadget tells us about an auction for a gold-played Wii originally intended for the Queen of England. Seems she was denied the shiny unit due to rules against gifts.

Trent Cannon of Nintendo Life reviews Prinny Presents: NIS Classics Volume 2 for Switch.

Alex Donaldson at VG247 warns us that Sonic Origins probably won’t have Sonic 3‘s original soundtrack, due to rights issues related to Michael Jackson’s involvement with the project. Sega has been hampered with music rights across several games, including the soundtrack for some ports of Crazy Taxi.

More from Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech tells us about Rifftrax: The Game!

Zoey Handley at Destructoid on Famicom Wars, the game of which the upcoming Advance Wars Reboot Camp is a distant sequel!

Rebecca Stone at Twinfinite tells us about the 10 highest-priced used Gamecube games going! Sadly none of those I still own are up there, drebnar, not even Kirby Air Ride!

Mike Wilson writing at Bloody Disgusting celebrates the 30th anniversary of Wolfenstein 3D!

Back around to Engadget, J. Trew tells us about the lengths to which players are pushing NES Tetris.

And Zoe Sottile at CNN (swanky!) notes that Ms. Pac-Man and The Legend of Zelda are being inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

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