I have an overabundance of games links to present through Set Side B. My usual style of doing this is to pick one of them, then maybe write a bit of text introducing it, maybe a bit of a preview, a media embed of it’s a video somewhere (nearly always Youtube), and that’s a complete post. One a day, for approaching four years now. (SSB launched on April 5th, 2022.)

But working this way, I’ve developed quite a backlog! Not all of them are really worthy of a whole post, maybe, or I don’t have a full post’s worth of context to coax out of it.

So in an effort to clean up my link collections, I think I’m going to make regular posts, maybe one a week, that’s just several things that might be interesting. I post them, my link folder get slightly shorter, each individual person might be interested in one or two items in it each, then we move on to more of the usual kind of thing the rest of the week.

Got all that? Here we go:

1. Dave’s Garage interviewed Commodore 64 chip designer Albert Charpentier three years ago (it’s about an 1 hour):

2. On Mastodon, there’s an account, @everybodyvotes@social,miyaku.media, that posts every poll published on the Wii’s “Everybody Votes” channel, back in the days when Nintendo would do fun, free things just for the sake of doing them. You can even vote on them again, using Mastodon’s polling feature.

3. On Balatro creator LocalThunk’s blog, they’ve published a timeline of its history, from original concept to launch, whereupon LocalThunk earned more money than he had ever had before in their entire life.

4. Back on Youtube, speedrunner Kosmic expresses disbelief on the current state of Super Mario Bros. speedrunning (24 minutes), which is more active than you’d think it’d be for a game that’s so old, and has had so much attention poured onto it.

rodneylives

The video is interesting, if you sift through it, for an interesting fact: a bug in Balatro’s seed-based randomness generation code sometimes produces a situation where one of its many number sources will get bugged, and produce the same number over and over again. This is the cause of the now-infamous seeds where, if you’re playing the Erratic Deck, all your cards end up as the 10 of Spades, as well as seeds that affect which cards you draw, and one where all the Jokers generated are Rare. The video is most interesting, I think, for describing that mechanism, and that is why it is offered here:

To get to the meat, it turns out there is GitHub out there that explains much about these bugged seeds, here.

rodneylives

One of the many Jokers you can obtain in the game is Misprint. (See right) Misprint’s function is to add a random number from 0 to 23 to the hand’s “Mult,” the chip value it’ll earn. It displays this, amusingly, as glitched description text that changes, and occasionally displays random, apparently garbled text.

Well as it turns out, it’s not random text at all. It’s a code that tells you what the card on top of your deck is! It’s the rank of the card (2-14 for its rank) and its suit (H for Hearts, etc.)!

Balatro is unusually devoid of other deck-peeking abilities. While there’s abilities that affect chips, Mult, Mult-multipliers, money, Tarot cards, Spectral cards and lots more, and you can at any time review what possible cards might be waiting in your deck, nothing will absolutely tell you what’s waiting for your next hand. And you don’t even have to have this Joker in play to use it, which is good, because it’s not great in many circumstances. If you go to the card’s spot in the Collection (provided it’s been gained at least once) and look at its description there, it still works! It’s been noted that it’ll even reveal the hidden identity of Stone Cards, which have their original values obscured by a layer of rock.

How does this affect the game? Well I’m going to go out on a limb and say, not as much as you’d think? It only reveals one card, and doesn’t say anything about its Enhancement, Edition or Seal. If you have more than one of a card, it’ll just tell you its rank and suit. That can still be used to deduce other properties of a card (if your only Red-Sealed Glass card is a 7 of Hearts, it’s a giveaway if Misprint reports a 7H) but it’ll require some setup, which is like nearly every other aspect of the game. It does slightly help you make specific hands, but even the best games of Balatro eventually run afoul of its ruthless ante scaling.

Every Set Side B post needs a link to a Youtube video, right? Here’s a breathless two minute one from BelenosBear explaining the trick:

Of particular note, Balatro University says they’ve known about this all along (18 seconds):

rodneylives