Tag: glitches

In NHL 2022, Secret Base makes the most violent NHL team of all time

EA Sports says you must accept this. EA Sports says this is your god. Your malformed football god.

Jon Bois has been an internet favorite ever since Breaking Madden, his series where he strained mightily to upturn all of the assumptions that the Madden football games make to present reasonable game experiences, and in so doing revealed those games are made out of cardboard and paste.

Modern EA has long been on the outs with me, but discovering that this company that has locked up the exclusive rights to make official games for multiple sports, for decades now, makes terribly buggy, broken product, has caused me to see them as a force for evil in the world. If you want to play with NFL teams, it’s either the Football Fetus (see above), or nothing. I know, capitalism sucks, but this is a particularly egregious example. But that’s beside the point.

(The only reason I’m not linking to an explanation for what the above thing is, is I’m saving it to post later. Keeping up a daily gaming blog is a marathon, not a sprint, and there is no reason to wind myself.)

Jon Bois and sitemate Kofie Yeboah now hold their game breaking adventures over at Youtube channel Secret Base, which also has a homepage. They mostly work in the medium of video now, which I can kind of understand? Youtube ads probably pay more than web page banners. I still miss their text output though. But that’s also beside the point.

What is the point? They have a new video where they tried to adjust the stats on an AI team in NHL 2022 with the sole purpose to get them to the end-game shootout, which apparently happens in the NHL in the primary season if overtime ends with a tie score, as often as possible. In the process they incidentally cause and win an epic number of fights and eventually take the Stanley Cup. And in the process, in typical EA Sports fashion, game bugs cause players to slowly skate with the full speed animation and sometimes put a spurious extra player on the ice in overtime for no discernible reason. Here it is:

Watching these videos and reading their old articles almost make me want to forget about my long-standing disdain for both EA Sports and pro sports games in general and get one just run crazy experiments like this. But only almost.

Video: GoldenTorizoCode

This is a channel on YouTube of various Super Metroid glitches and weirdness. A lot of it is pretty deep magic, and they tend to throw around evocative terms like Murder Beam, Chainsaw Beam, and even Spacetime Beam. Those links are useful in understanding what in the burning acidic heck the narrator is talking about. Knowing and caring about the gameplay of Super Metroid is, of course, required for comprehension.

But if you do know about Super Metroid, and you do care about learning about some of the more ridiculous glitches in videogamedom, then you’re in for something that is a reasonable approximation of entertainment.

The name of the channel refers to a debug feature left in Super Metroid’s code, that can be pulled off without hyper-obscure tech, although in the process it’s likely to crash your game. When you enter into the room of the of the bosses, the Golden Torizo, if all of the face buttons are held down during the transition, your equipment will be overwritten by a number of items. The code gives you all of the beam weapons in the game, which is good, but also turns them all on at once, producing the afore-mentioned Murder Beam, which will likely crash the game, not good. The opposite of good.

Here’s links to a few of these videos: an unused enemy called a Bang, activating “God Mode,” and how to obtain and use the end-game weapon Hyper Beam against bosses. It is some pretty intense geekery, but that’s sometimes what flows out of the faucets around here.

Video: The History of the A-Button Challenge

It’s now been some years since pannenkoek2012’s “A-button challenge” videos hit the scene, introducing the internet to hyper-obscure Super Mario 64 glitch concepts like the HOLP and Parallel Universes. For the record, those videos can be seen here and here, and if you haven’t seen them before, you are in for a ride. Videos like the Walls, Floors, and Ceilings series (37 minutes, 32 minutes and 37 minutes) are not only interesting in their own right (to people of a certain mindset) but are a good introduction to concepts for writing your own 3D platforming engine.

These videos are all ultimately in service to the A Button Challenge, a long-running quest to try to complete Super Mario 64 with a few presses of the A button as possible. What may seem like a completely spurious pastime, it turns out, has been an obsession with some players since not long after the game first came out!

The origins and history of the A Button Challenge are explained by a surprisingly long and deep series by YouTube user Bismuth, totaling over four hours of video and, as I write this, isn’t even complete. I’m not sure how many people would be interested in watching so much on such a niche endeavor, but pannenkoek’s videos have been popular enough that I figure they must be out there, and some of them may even read this blog, so here goes!