There’s a playlist of the 51 (as of this writing) stars, and none of them have many hits right now. It’s possible that he does them in batches and just posts one a day, but that’s fine. It’s nice to just follow along at this pace.
Twinbeard hasn’t fallen prey to something I hate about the video internet, which I could complain of as TikTokification, but honestly there are people on TikTok who aren’t nearly as bad as some on Youtube. And Youtube was trending towards it anyway, with their often unwatchable Shorts section serving as just an extreme example of pre-existing trends. It may just be my advancing age, but I really really really dislike much of what I see on Shorts, and Twinbeard’s videos are a nice alternative to it.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Super Mario World is one of the most hacked games of all. There’s a whole website devoted to hacking it, SMWCentral. They do have Yoshi’s Island and Super Mario 64 hacks too, but SMW is the main attraction.
They’ve done a bunch of contests over the years, where different members compete in judged hacking competitions to make hacks to various criteria. In April they wrapped up their second “Questionable Level Design Contest,” QLDC. And the gimmick of the winner is… pretty special.
Please overlooked the glitchy title screen. In this one, the presentation isn’t the main attraction.
A long walkway to the right from the starting location.
What? Is this a troll hack? One that just makes you run everywhere and nothing ever really happens?
Hmm. This screen looks like it’s full of levels, but none of the circles or houses work. The object is to get to that red pipe.
You hold X or Y to run, or, as this screen mentions, don’t hold X or Y to not run. That Pirhana Plant is animated, and if you run into it while it’s in your way, you have to restart the screen. A fun gimmick, sure, but we’re just getting started.
In case you haven’t cottoned to the gimmick yet–there is no actual level. The whole game is played on a series of connected map screens. You’d think not a lot would be possible, but in this hack, Mario can actually “jump” on enemies if his feet touch them. On this screen, Bullet Bills enter from the right, and you have to use the curved paths, along with judicious running, to “stomp” them with the right timing. When you reach the OFF circles to the right you clear the green blocks, and then have to work your way back left to get to the pipe.
And on this screen, the Thwimps jump back and forth, and you have to avoid them as you pass around the screen. If you touch an enemy you don’t “die” so much as get sent back to the start.
Then you get to this screen, which is a remake of a portion of the first level, and you wonder how far they’re willing to go with this gimmick.
As it turns out, they’re (“they” being Faro and MM102) not even close to being done. This level introduces these Stars that, when you press A on them, cause Mario to do a spin jump. This jump, however, actually activates the standard SMW platforming engine. Mario can move around as if he were in a level. Here you have to use that jump to bounce off the Big Boo and land on the other Star, which puts you back into map travel mode and lets you go to the pipe. The following levels make extensive use of this feature, and there’s lots left to explore.
The creators made a playthrough video, embedded below (it’s about nine minutes), but they suggest that you try the hack yourself first. You can do what you want, but it’s a joy discovering how they unveil progressively crazier gimmicks as you go. Consider trying it our yourself first, if you have the mind and means.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Sometimes on Sunday we find very old things that survive down to us through years. But sometimes we find some fairly new memes, and this is one of those.
I don’t know when or where this started, but there’s this collection of videos on Youtube that are just silence, but with, very once in a while, maybe every two or three minutes, a sound effect to break the repose. Fortunately, most of these videos lead off with the sound effect, so you’ll know kind of what the result will be.
Why load up a video like this? Well as far as I can tell, the idea is to have it playing in the background while you do other things, such as watch a movie. Once in a while, the sound will happen to play around the time something significant in the other thing happens, and the unexpected juxtaposition is humorous, or at least interesting. Basically, humor through randomness. I’ve long had an idea for a mobile app that would do something like this, with randomized noises, but in the end figured it was too niche to bother with. Maybe I should try it after all?
While this idea extends beyond just video game sounds, several prominent examples have to do with games, keeping us within our site’s roomy theme. For best results, whatever those might be, it’s probably best to have on an ad blocker, or else some of the random noises will be commercials for terrible mobile games or Old Spice deodorant.
Here’s Lego Yoda screaming sporadically:
Mario, doing something similar:
Now the interruption is by the first four notes of Megalovania from Undertale:
A Minecraft Villager peppers your the next hour with infrequent noises:
Or here, just Minecraft sounds in general. The sounds in this one are fairly frequent, two or three a minute. There has got to be a Creeper noise in there somewhere to cause sudden jolts, I’m sure:
Angry Bird game noises:
The Mario 64 Thwomp sound effect:
Waluigi:
And, a duck quacking. It’s not a video game duck. I just like ducks.
If you watch more than one of these, expect your Youtube suggestions to get weird for a while. Now that your day has been enlivened and enriched I take my leave of you until the morrow. Ta!
ZoomZike on Youtube has been working for years on a comprehensive series of videos going through all the Mario Party games, and breaking down what parts of each are a matter of luck, and how many are of skill. Along the way, they also serve as fine guides to winning at them, at least as far as you are able.
They’ve gone through the series, trending longer with each one, for each game from Mario Party 1 through 7 (with an April Fool’s stop over at Advance). Even the shortest is at least an hour, and the most recent one is over five hours. That might seem like a whole lot, but imagine how long it took to construct! These are really deep videos, often with odds figured out through exhaustive, and exhausting, trial and error.
Mario Party 7 is the last of the four Mario Party games that came out for the Gamecube, even beating out the N64 portion of the series by one game. The early MPs were notorious controller destroyers, often resulting in the dreaded white dust of death, a result of ground plastic, emerging from the controller after heavy play. The Gamecube had controllers that weren’t as susceptible to wearing out, and so were better suited for the demanding play that Mario Party provides.
Anyway, here is the video, all five hours and 25 minutes of it:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Pringus McDingus again. Maybe a little explanation of this one would be to the benefit of those who aren’t so extremely online.
Sigil of madness
Super Mario Wonder is one of the games that was announced at the recent Nintendo Direct. The Elephant Berry is a powerup shown in that game. The green symbol in the berry’s eyes is the Deviantart logo. And what Daisy does in this animation is perfectly understandable and maybe even necessary.
I’ve mentioned Kaze Emanuar’s efforts to make the best Mario 64 there can possibly be on its native hardware. He’s compiled it with optimization flags turned on, made its platforming engine much more efficient, and worked hard to minimize cache misses, which was a major source of slowdowns in the game’s code. Under his efforts, he’s gotten the engine running at 60fps (although not yet in a playable version of the original). While these optimizations are not the kind of thing that can keep being found indefinitely, he’s bound to run out of ways to tune up the code, currently he’s still finding new ways to speed it up.
I hope you’re ready for some F-U-N (approximation FUNctions)
He made a Youtube video detailing his most recent optimization find: getting the game’s trigonometric functions executing at their speediest. What is interesting is that the Mario 64 code already uses a couple of tricks to get sine and cosine results in a rapid manner: the game only uses 4096 discrete angles of movement direction, and contains a lookup table that covers each of those angles. But it turns out that this optimization is actually a mis-optimization, because the RAM bus hits incurred to read the values into the cache are actually more expensive than just figuring out the values in code on the N64’s hardware!
The video starts out decently comprehensible, but eventually descends into the process of figuring out sine and cosine on the fly, and the virtues of the various ways this can be done, so you can’t be faulted for bailing before the end, possibly at the moment the dreaded words “Taylor series” are mentioned. But it’s a fairly interesting watch until then!
Wonderful Mario obscurity blog Supper Mario Broth recently posted about evidence found in the cart for a playable Princess Peach in the Mario 64 remake for the Nintendo DS. Incomplete, slightly broken animations for Peach were found in the game’s data.
The original post shows the animations in motion, which includes some glitchy movement in her right arm. Maybe she was meant to hold something in it?
Silly videogame fanvids are a rather more involved to construct than you might think. What may seem like a jumble of abrupt cuts, nonsensical references and silly sound effects takes a huge amount of time and effort to put together.
This video may be composed of silly images and animations, but beneath the hood there is real artistry in it. One of the first shots is a remake of the 3D flythrough from the beginning of Super Mario 64. See for yourself, the whole video’s about nine minutes long:
At the end, creator Spicevipe says it’s their last video game animation ever. We wish them well with their future efforts!
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Another of Mario 64 internals expert Maze Emanuar’s amazing hacks, this puts the geometry of all of the levels of Mario 64 into into huge world! It does offer gameplay in that you can collect some stars that are scattered around the huge area, but few of the original objectives remain. For more information and the download link to the hack, check the description of the video.
Playing the Super Mario Bros. theme live with a variety of instruments has been an internet video staple for a couple decades now. Here it is with accordion and a harp-like instrument called a bandura:
Thanks to Kevin Rothrock for finding this, and to Maks for finding it on Youtube!
PannenKoel2012 is the Super Mario 64 enthusiast (that’s the only word I can think of that matches) who has been working on reducing the number of A button presses needed to finish the game. They haven’t gotten it down to zero yet, and likely never will, but by resorting to increasingly extreme measures they continue to figure out ways to get it down. I think they’ve been working at this project for over 12 years; the oldest video on their Youtube account is that old.
Of arguably more interest than their quest, though, is its interesting byproducts, which is a series of Youtube videos, on both their main channel and alternate channel UncommentatedPannen, which not only explain how their many subtle and effective stratagems work, but also a number of aspects of how Super Mario 64’s engine works, and even basic principles of computer science. These videos are so in-depth that they have their own wiki to track the concepts they use, to explain turns like Parallel Universe (PU) and Pedro Spot.
When I say they return, it’s not that they ever left, but it’d been a while since they had a solid explainer. Now they have one, it has spoken narration instead of the text that marks many of the best videos, and the production values have even increased a bit:
In this video, a clever way to manipulate the pendulums in Tick Tock Clock to crash the game after 39 1/2 days of playing also takes into its sweep an excellent explanation of many of the systems compilers use to represent numbers and their limitations.
Via Matthew Green at Press The Buttons, Pedro Pascal in a mocked-up trailer made by Saturday Night Live positing a prestige Mario Kart drama produced by HBO:
