By now lots of people know, in classic Sonic the Hedgehog games, if you wait a few seconds without touching a control, Sonic will look at you and tap his foot impatiently.
Fewer people know that Sonic CD goes a step farther. If you wait three minutes without moving Sonic, he’ll say aloud “I’m outta here!” (his first voiced line in the series!) and jump off the screen. What’s more, this ends your game. As Sonic abandons his journey, the game will deduct all of his lives, and the GAME OVER notice appears immediately. The hedgehog has been offended! Learn to pause the game next time, player.
The gag seems like it may have been hastily programmed, because there are a lot of quirks to the animation that play around oddly, and conflict in some ways, with the other aspects of the game. Camamania shows off all the bugs and glitches around the joke in a 7½-minute video.
Among the cases are when Sonic’s jump causes him to trigger a boss fight, to enter an acceleration tube, and when it causes him to cross the level-end sign. Some of them only apply to the MegaCD original, having been fixed in the US version, and some have different behavior in the 2011 remake. Interesting behavior, so says I!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Creator Gooseworx really made something terrific with TADC, which seems nearly universally adored. It might be too popular, as she had to put up, as sometimes happens with people who make much admired things, with some amount of harassment online about it, with her saying she might retreat from internet circles once it’s done. I’m reminded of some of the flak Rebecca Sugar caught for making Steven Universe, they simply couldn’t do right with some people, or so it seemed.
This is the eighth episode (32 minutes) of the Youtube, now also Netflix, series. It’s produced by Glitch Productions, who also made Murder Drones and are making the upcoming Knights of Guinevere. The premise: a number of human beings have been shanghai’d into a circus-themed virtual world without their consent, existing there as wacky and whimsical-looking characters who greatly want to leave. Their existence there is made even more difficult by Caine, the circus’ AI overseer and ruler.
Caine’s purpose is to keep the humans sane in their imprisonment by giving them videogame-like adventures (which is why we’re talking about it here). Caine has up til now desperately tried to please his inmates with fun and entertaining activities, but is in way over his head, and inflict various types of trauma on them.
As their adventures have continued, Caine’s gotten more and more anxious by the fact that the humans don’t seem to be enjoying his efforts. When a human being becomes so distraught with their inability to leave the virtual world they abstract, becoming a big unthinking glitchy eyeball-monster that Caine disposes of by putting them in “the Cellar,” a big dark empty space. It’s known that this has happened several times before, and the series has dropped hints as to what the characters were like before.
As the first episode revealed, abstracted characters are dangerous to the objects in the world and to the other humans, but Caine has instantly fixed any character who’s been attacked.
The human characters don’t all get along either. The newest one, Pomni, had difficulty adjusting to the circus, to say the least. Easygoing Ragatha is sort of a punching bag for Jax, a snarky Bugs Bunny type who loves to antagonize the others, especially Gangle, an insecure ribbon-and-mask creature, and Zooble, whose body is made out of various interchangeable parts.
And then there’s Kinger, the one who’s been there the longest, and the least stable. Over time it’s been gradually revealed that Kinger isn’t really who he seem to be, that he has a special place in the VR world that he’s forgotten about. He was greatly affected by the abstraction of his wife Queenie, and is hugely forgetful, but seems to calm down and become more lucid in dark places, like inside a pillow fort that he spends his time in between adventures. At odd moments he’s been known to just create things, like a healing butterfly in the FPS-themed episode. And despite being around the longest, Kinger has never abstracted himself.
In episode 7, the characters were approached by a character named Abel, who claimed to be a human that Caine forgot about. Abel offered them a way to escape the circus, and while it didn’t pan out, it did reveal Caine’s inner sanctum, where he keeps the VR worlds that he makes and sends the human characters into.
Now, in the penultimate episode, Caine is driven to anger and madness by how the trapped humans don’t appreciate his efforts. Gooseworx has said that the show was inspired by Harlan Ellison’s story I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, saying the premise is similar but one where the VR overseer isn’t a wrathful entity of anger but more of a wacky happy little guy, and the comparison becomes explicit in this episode. And it ends on a fateful note.
Goosework made a number of excellent Youtube animations before this one, like Little Runmo, and I hope they haven’t been too put off by online harassment and continue to create new things.
Wow, Ocarina of Time has some bizarre glitches. There is one where if you talk to a character with a specific object in hand, you get absolutely the wrong item in return. I need to pin down the details so I’ll talk about that one later.
In the meantime, here’s another ridiculous glitch, explained by Skawo. (7 minutes) Skawo’s style is to use onscreen text to do the talking, which I can appreciate since I usually have subtitles on anyway.
In brief, due to the way the game handles weather, if you enter Kakariko Village during a certain story event, then leave it immediately, it starts raining heavily, then doesn’t have the chance to stop. The game handles lighting separately for each time of day and each kind of weather. Kakariko has a table for the specific kind of weather for that event, HEAVY_RAIN, but most places don’t, so the game refers to a table of garbage data to provide lighting for places. That causes Hyrule Field to take on a bright purple hue, among other places. Have a look!
This one is incredible. The Monkey Ball games are as hardcore as they come, and, for the most part, have reasonably accurate physics that’s consistent under normal circumstances. But normal circumstances do not apply at extremely high speeds, where weird edge cases in the engine become much more likely to affect the ball’s travel.
Nambo created a video that showcases every Super Monkey Ball glitch, for the first two games at least. The video title calls them techniques, but I think glitches more accurately describes what’s being explicated here.
The video is amazingly complete and is 42 minutes long. It takes some kind of ridiculous ultrageek to watch the whole thing. Yes, I did that, why do you ask? Are you going to do it too? If you don’t it’s no skin off of your nose, maybe just watch enough of it to get some idea of how deep the Super Monkey Hole goes?
File this under blasphemous acts of hackery, reported on by Video Game Esoterica (Youtube, 10 minutes) and Time Extension, a super-deluxe techno-nuts person going by malucard is trying to port Super Mario 64 to the original Playstation. They have a GitHub repo containing their efforts so far.
The growing number of fan-made decompilations of classic games is what make these hilarious affronts to the very idea of console exclusivity possible. But while ports of such games to PC platforms allow for much greater visual clarity and the resolution of long-standing deficiencies, this is almost a celebration of the idea of technical limitations—and I, for one, am all in favor. But you have to understand, I’ve given serious thought to the idea of picking up an old CP/M machine and coding on it in assembly. I’m crazy pants, is what I’m saying, and on things of this nature you probably shouldn’t be listening to me.
Just look at the footage in that video, and how it’s more glitch than game. It seems impossible that it’ll ever run like the N64 original, but we can dream, can’t we?
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
The circus is back, the creation of wonderful Youtube animator Gooseworx and distributed by Glitch on Youtube and Netflix. We’ve linked to several of their past installments, for being obviously computer-game adjacent. It’s about a bunch of humans trapped in a virtual world, as cartoon characters, overseen by a well-meaning but generally hapless AI overseer.
Here are the previous times we’ve linked TADC: Episodes 1-3, Episode 4 and (with Wigglewood) Episode 5. If you aren’t caught up it might be a good idea to see the ones you’ve missed; if you’re new, you should at least watch the first episode to get a good idea of the situation and the characters.
So, that new cartoon (34 minutes). Fed up with trying to come up with interesting adventures for the trapped humans, ringmaster Caine just dumps a bunch of guns in on them and puts them in a standard first-person shooter scenario: everyone gets three lives, go ahead and kill each other. the stakes are pretty light because they can’t die, a fact understood intuitively by the most mischievous of the Circus’s inmakes, Jax.
Not many of the characters like Jax. He’s the most cartoon-like of the bunch of them, always teasing the others, sometimes relentlessly, and making them the butt of his jokes. He really leans into his animated reality, a Bugs Bunny figure (although one who hates cross-dressing). But it’s hinted that he hasn’t always been like that, that he lost a friend, a frog called Ribbit, to being abstracted, the closest a Digital Circus character comes to truly dying, turning into a big blob-like eyeball monster and then being sent by Caine to a dark place called The Cellar for the safety of the others.
It’s a fun episode, but also very dark. Of course, most Amazing Digital Circus episodes are that way. Here it is:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It was vitally important to tell all of you about Pugberto last week, I’m sure you’ll all agree. A couple of other items had to wait a week before I could present them to you.
The Amazing Digitial Circus has a fifth episode now. It got over 40 million views in a few days so there’s a good chance you’ve found it by now. Still though, here ’tis (25m):
The Amazing Digital Circus has merchandise, and some pretty amusing videos to sell it. There’s a new one of those too (4m):
Over on a much less trafficked portion of Youtube, the hapless heroes of the Wigglewood Tales have a couple of new videos too, The Bandit (2m):
Final Fantasy games tend to have weird and crazy bugs, and VII was certainly no different. A bug beloved of speedrunners is called “Cloudsurfing,” where taking advantage of the way the game detects walkable overworld triangles and the way they’re cached to use Chocobos to walk over oceans and through mountains. Properly utilized, it can be used to skip a large portion of Disc 1.
Prior Final Fantasy games used a simple tilemap to represent terrain. Final Fantasy VII’s overworld switched over to a world made up of triangles, each of which with a terrain code that indicated which entities can traverse it.
The triangles, additionally, are divided into square chunks. No triangle extends outside its chunk. Additionally, in each chunk, the triangle vertices aren’t represented literally for each triangle. Instead, the triangle coordinates are indexes into a list of coordinates, all to save a bit more memory.
Now, while each chunk is much smaller than the entire overworld, each can have over 100 triangles, so the code does some additional optimization. It keeps track of the last six triangles Cloud has touched, and checks them first when moving. If a triangle in this list is touched, then the search is stopped without checking the 100+ other triangles in the chunk.
Now, chunks are loaded into memory dynamically as Cloud explores, both for interaction and for rendering. The game loads the 25 chunks immediately around him off the disk, and some more in the direction the camera is facing. These chunks are constantly going stale (going out of range) and being refreshed as Cloud moves and the camera changes direction. Chunks are stored in a linked list, so are usually located by pointers, which means the chunks don’t need to be actually moved in memory, but instead references to them are copied and moved around. Some older chunks stick around in memory, then, while new ones are loaded, and the new chunks get moved to the top of the list.
Now this is the hardest part for me to explain, as I don’t have the firmest grasp on it….
When Cloud boards most vehicles, his entity is despawned and the vehicle is created with an empty list of cached triangles. But when he gets on a Chocobo, his entity is not despawned. While the Chocobo has its own cached list of triangles, since Cloud is still being rendered on screen, his entity is preserved, and with it pointers to the last triangles he interacted with. These are kept, unused, while the Chocobo handles all of the collision and terrain checking.
When Cloud gets off Choccy, he still has a list of the last triangles he interacted with… but they refer to the data from the chunk he was last in. Now the game is smart enough that, if this is different from his original chunk, to refresh things, but if it’s the same chunk I think this doesn’t happen. But this doesn’t mean everything will work without problems. The chunks will probably be loaded in a different order, and that means the cached triangles will refer to different data.
And since the vertices themselves aren’t stored in the triangle list, but indexes* to another list of data, it’s possible for some of this data to come from outside of the expected area, and for there to be duplicated coordinates among them.
Due to the way FFVII figures out which triangle Cloud is in, if two of the points in a triangle are on the same location, the game becomes much less discerning about whether Cloud is inside it or not. And if all three of the triangle’s vertices are in the same spot, forming what’s called a point triangle, just a single dot, then the game can’t declare Cloud is outside of it at all! So long as that triangle gets checked first, then the game will think Cloud is inside that triangle, so long as he’s in the same chunk. This could potentially turn the whole thing walkable.
Did I get it sufficiently right? Watch the video, and decide for yourself!
* The English graduate in me demands I point out that I know I’m being inconsistent with the plurals of vertex and index. Properly, like how I’m not writing vertexes, I should be writing indices, not indexes. I think that index is used more in contemporary English, so I made an editorial decision to pluralize it in a more familiar way. There, explanation: given.
I had a different post ready to go today, but it’s been delayed by a few days for unavoidable reasons, so let’s do another Nintendo obscurity video, this time for things that can be found “out of bounds.” There’s several interesting cases mentioned and shown off here in this video from Nintendo Unity. It’s 11 minutes long.
Some of cases shown:
In Punch-Out!! on the Wii, off-camera, Piston Hondo is reading a Sailor Moon manga in a between-round cutscene.
On the original Pikmin’s title menu, the name of the menu programmer is off-camera to the left.
There’s a cartoon drawing of a Goomba as a texture beneath Pinna Park in Super Mario Sunshine. This has been given the name “Kug,” and there’s more information on it on Supper Mario Broth and The Cutting Room Floor.
Noki Bay in Sunshine has a model of a book locked in an unreachable area. There’s more info on it on The Cutting Room Floor.
This one’s relatively well known: the trophy of Princess Daisy in Super Smash Bros. Melee has a texturing error that gives her a third eye, hidden beneath her hair on the back of her head. The trophy for Meta Ridley also has a hidden heart texture inside of it.
In Earthbound, if you can clip outside of the terrain in the upper-right corner of Onett, you can reach the ultimate upper-right corner of the whole map. (All of the areas in Earthbound are connected on a single huge map!) Interacting with the corner there can access a debug menu left in the game.
There’s a secret control room beneath the island in Donkey Kong 64.
Another well known glitch, the video mentions the glitch that lets Samus get inside the level terrain in Metroid by rolling into a ball and coming out of it repeatedly while a closed door surrounds her. This is the means by which people can get to the glitchy “secret worlds” mentioned in an early issue of the Nintendo Fun Club News.
At the end, the video reminds of the “Minus World” glitch in NES Super Mario Bros.
Argh! This video from Press A! on Youtube promises big by promising to explain how speedrunners blast through the over 5 1/2 million Bells needed to fully upgrade their (pre-2.0) house in Animal Crossing New Horizons, but then in typical game Youtuber fashion they explain nearly everything else about the game, the debt, and all the other things speedrunners must do along the way! Here is the 12-minute video, but I’ll give you the gist below:
First: the glitch only works on version 1.2.1 or earlier, so nowadays it requires hacks to downgrade your Switch to do them. And the trick also means having at least two users on the same Switch, both with residents on the island.
The trick involves duplicating items, then selling the duplicates. The items are duplicated by putting an item that can have other objects put on top of it, like tables or the cardboard boxes in the Recycle Bin, down near the border of the town square area.
First, an expensive item is put on the table or box. The Switch promo item given to the first player upon starting the game is typically used by runners. Both players are brought in, then the second player spins the box while the first player picks the item up off of the box. If done on the same frame, Player One will pick up the item, but Player Two’s rotating of the box will mean it also remains on the box. Now there’s two copies of the item. This process can be repeated immediately, filling up Player One’s inventory with the item. They then sell the items for profit, and continue.
I miss the days when you could just find this out from a text file on GameFAQs, but then tricks like that are a lot harder to discover randomly these days without something like Youtube’s discovery algorithm to uncover them, although it too is random and scattershot, or else following a ton of Discords to seek out all of the little gaming communities where all this data is hoarded.
So that is how they do it, but since it’s specifically on an old version of the game that you can’t even play anymore it’s of limited use to normal players. New Horizons changed so much in that first year that this information is largely of use as a curiosity unless you’re involved in the frankly bizarre speedrunning community.
My own trick for paying off your house means breeding expensive roses, ideally blue but black will do, then growing tons of them in the fields of your island and selling them. If you have the DIY recipes to make wreathes or crown from them, then it doubles their sale price. It won’t pay off your house of in under two hours, but if you can get your starter roses from elsewhere, you can pay it off much faster that way, maybe in a couple of months. I’ve explained the details of that process before, and in multiple places, but hey at least I didn’t just post it in a Discord where non-obsessives will never see it.
There, that’s my annoyed internet oldbie rant for today. Come back tomorrow where I’ll shake my fist at something else, probably AI slop. Ta!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Who, among everyone on the internet, is just finding out about the release of Episode 4 of the breakout Youtube hit The Amazing Digital Circus here? It’s already up to 44 million views.
I’ll embed it here, but before we get to that it’s worth noting how it got to this place. Its creator Gooseworx made a number of items before it, including one linked to directly from these halls, Little Runmo. A few other representative Worx from the Goose are The Darly Boxman Show, The Ghost of the Year Award and Elain the Bounty Hunter.
Not too long ago Gooseworx joined up with Glitch Productions, a small outfit that hither-then had been known mostly for machinima based on Super Mario 64. Soon after they released the extremely popular show Murder Drones, but it was tADC that really caused them to blow up.
Now, tADC is released on Netflix around the same time it debuts on Youtube. I hope they didn’t have to sign some kind of demonic contract to do that; some folk have been treated badly by the Netflix regime. But the show is still on Youtube and can be watched there, if you can put up with their horrendous advertising scheme, that is.
Several characters show heretofore unseen sides of their personalities in this one. Up until now Gangle has only been a bit character; usually-helpful Ragatha spends most of the episode in a Stupid Sauce stupor; and Jax, under the prospect of punishment, doesn’t get to be nearly as entertainingly belligerent as in the past. It also sees the return of Gummigoo, but is it really the same person as Pomni remembers?
Gooseworx has a Tumblr, which is full of hints about the show and the direction it may take. One piece of information revealed there is that The Amazing Digital Circus is planned to be a limited series, with a total of nine episodes, although with some possible short detours along the way. The show has turned out to be popular in Japan, and there’s a manga adaptation of it being web-published. I’ll leave it to you to find links to that (there’s fan translations out there too), but one fun page from it, from the issue-end artist created content, is this festive/creepy Abstracted Kaufmo christmas tree!
It’s a bit old, but Chaz on Youtube has a great video explaining some weird facts about Earthbound, including mysterious crashes, when the game registers the effects of statuses like Sunstroke, and why there’s a small number of places in the game where you can find an early enemy, the Mole Playing Rough, in regions where you usually find much stronger enemies. It’s ten minutes long:
Here’s the gist:
Earthbound maintains a flag that the video calls the Overworld Status Supression Flag. If this flag is on then your characters can’t get a number of statuses like Sunstroke, or take environmental damage. If this flag is on, though, and your party loses to a scripted (not random) battle, then a bug is triggered that’s popularly called the Game Over Glitch: the battle loss cutscene music plays, but the screen turns black and nothing appears to work. In fact, the game has not crashed: entering the Town Map screen, or feeling around for and entering a door, will display graphics again, although glitched out. The Game Over Glitch is best known for happening if the player loses to one of the Shattered Man fights in the Museum after the game has been won: during the ending, the Overworld Status Supression Flag is set on permanently, so getting into any scripted fight and losing will result in the glitch happening.
As it turns out, random encounters disable the flag. So there is a hard-to-avoid Mole Playing Rough at the entrances to areas with environmental damage, to make sure the flag is turned off. But the mole is just hard to avoid, not impossible, so if you can avoid it, and all other random enemies of course, and then reach a place with a scripted fight, then lose to it, the glitch will still happen.
