Kenji Eno (Wikipedia), the creator of horror games D and Enemy Zero, and other iconoclastic games like You, Me and the Cubes (Wikipedia). He passed away from a heart attack in 2013.
Shigeru Miyamoto (for form’s sake, Wikipedia) is of course the legendary game designer and producer at Nintendo, creator of Donkey Kong and Mario, and designer of Super Mario 64, among other titles. He’s still with us.
The interview happened shortly after the release of Mario 64, and is interesting because Eno is not unduly laudatory of it. He says it’s a good game, but feels it was missing something from its Space World presentation. Miyamoto agrees somewhat, that the free exploration of the prototype version was not as much in evidence, and thought it lost something by giving the player more direction, but that the demands of the marketplace, and the need for Nintendo to have a big hit to promote their new console, forced their hand. (Aside: the Space World version of SM64 has never turned up, not even in the infamous “Gigaleak” from 2020. shmuplations notes that The Preservation project (patch, github) is a fan attempt to recreate it.)
Screenshot from The Preservation Project (image from romhacking.com)
It’s an incredibly revealing interview, not the least reason being it discusses Nintendo’s hopes for the 64DD. I think you’ll find it very interesting, if you’re the kind of person I think you are.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Two items this week. One is this simple yet charming video of someone who made a crank organ (festooned with plush parrots and a decorative octopus) and configured it to play the ending music, titled simply “Staff Roll,” to Super Mario 64. It’s very nice to listen to, and it’s only about three minutes long. Please enjoy!
The other thing? Oh, the final episode of The Amazing Digital Circus, which released to theaters a couple of weeks ago, finally hit Youtube. Everyone probably knows that already! It didn’t to badly in theaters (I saw it there myself for the first time), but now that it’s on Youtube the saga Pomni and her friends in their weirdly video game-like world is over. There’s laughs, quite a bit of sadness, and a hopeful tone at the end. I greatly enjoyed it! If you haven’t seen it yet here it is (58 minutes).
Will we ever see the Circus and its denizens again? Who knows? Creator Gooseworx has said she’s tired of working on it, but she seemed to leave open the possibility that production company Glitch could do something. The characters are interesting and unique, and we should be happy with what we have. But who knows?
Everyone that counts loves Pannenkoek, whose two Youtube channels pannenkoek2012 and UncommentatedPannen are probably the best, certainly the best-known, videogame internal explainers on the internet. They somehow made people care about an obscure Super Mario 64 challenge to get through the game in as few A button presses as possible. How can that even be?
Not only do they explain, I won’t say effortlessly, but effectively how tiny implementation consequences in the foundational 3D platformer, but along the way they explain a bunch of useful computer science concepts. They are a wonder, and if Nintendo ever paid attention to their fan communities for purposes other than suing them or making them pay licenses to use Their Content, they would hire them like a shot. But they don’t, and they won’t*.
Whenever Pannenkoek publishes a notable new video I usually try to draw a little extra attention to it here, but it’s been a little while since the last one. So here’s three shorter ones, all permutations of the topic of 1-up Mushrooms.
From 12 years ago: 1-up Checkpoint Locations, all the places you can go to increase your already swollen extra life count from 72 to 73 (7 minutes):
There are a few 1-ups in the Bowser levels that aren’t always there. It turns out the game can be set to make them appear only if you’ve already gotten the key from a particular Bowser fight, and that’s what’s going on there. It’s explained here: (1 minute)
And the longest one at 12 minutes, why do some 1-ups flicker before disappearing? Along the way it painlessly explains object activation, visibility and spawning, and the six types of 1-ups:
* A few more contractions, all nonsense: bron’t, fron’t, plon’t, hron’t, vnon’t.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A comment says, Fludd was their favorite They Might Be Giants album, but that doesn’t quite work; Fludd’s from Super Mario Sunshine, the 3D Mario game after Super Mario 64.
Even so, Seanathan S has made quite the recreation. (3 minutes) No vocals, but if you know the song you can recognize the track that’s duplicating the syllables of the singing and sing along with the. Everything is intact, even down to Flansberg’s counterpoint chorus at the end.
My first Multilink Monday of the year, my concession that I have way too many tabs in my “Set Side B” group and I have to do something to clean them out. Hopefully at least one of these things will hit the right atoms in your brain to induce pleasure, or “trigger dopamine,” in the words and thoughts of a legion of hack game designers. Aid I don’t mean the good kind of Hack either. Let us begin!
Your AI Slop Bores Me is a terrific little game where you can enter a prompt for a bit of text or a drawing, and then it’s randomly assigned to someone else viewing the other tab to fulfill the prompt. Answering a question (in whatever way) awards you “tokens” that you can spend to enter more prompts.
Omedas on Youtube has an exhaustive article about the search for the perfect jump arc in Super Mario 64, the mathematics of determining it, and what people have come up with towards solving this puzzleIt. SOMEHOW ITS 45 MINUTES LONG.
Hackaday has an article about one bright hacker’s work to restore the Wii’s pizza channel (which was never released in the US) so it can order from Dominos.
Finally this is a bit of a selflink but hey, we’re not on Metafilter here are we? An online friend named GothPanda has created a modest little Yahoo-like web directory called Neato!, and I’ve been contributing links to it. We’re up to 63! I’m signed on as a “guide,” so if you contribute links to it with the Add link, I’ll have a look at them and consider adding them! But be warned, this is not a site to stick your SEO links! Nyaah!
I had a different post planned for today, but decided to put it off for tomorrow to polish it a little. So until then, PannenKoek, the Mario 64 obsessive who’s the reason we all know about the A Button Challenge, has a recemt 32-minute video all about the Chain Chomp in Bob-Omb Battlefield, an iconic part of the level and the star of a lot of glitches and other oddities.
Things like:
Unlike most spherical enemies in the game, Chain Chomp is fully polygonal, and the highlight off of its shiny surface changes direction depending on the direction its facing, not the direction of the camera.
If Mario gets hit, if he’s quick he can stand inside its hitbox and, so long as he reminds inside it, his invulnerability time will never end, and he can remain there safely indefinitely.
If you stand beside the Chomp in just the right place, it can be arranged so that it’ll never be able to hit Mario, but will make tight circles around him until he moves.
The cutscene that happens when Mario stomps the post Chompy is chained to has a number of oddities behind it. It tries to adopt for the Chomp’s current position, but things can happen like it falling off the ledge before leaping for the gate, or getting stuck in a state where the cutscene can never complete, softlocking the game.
That’s just the beginning! For more Chomp Cheats, please view its vicious video!
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?
I’ve got a huge backlog of things to post about, so once a week I’m going to just dump a few of them into a post, preferably on a Monday without much discussion of the contents, just to get them out of my notes. I figured I’d do a new pixel art banner for this idea later, for now let’s get to the links!
PannenKoek, Youtube’s foremost expert on Super Mario 64 esoterica, has made another video (35 minutes). This one’s about how they managed to get all the way up the tower in Whomp’s Fortress without pressing the A button at all.
To remind: not pressing the A is troublesome to build a challenge around (that being what makes it interesting) because it’s Mario’s most fundamental verb: the jump button. On the Gamecube, it was physically the biggest button! I loved that about its controller: these days I always get the buttons mixed up, as a result of some games making the left button the main one, and some making the bottom one. On the Gamecube, there was no question. But the A Button Challenge asks that you use it as little as possible.
The issue with Whomp’s Tower is that it’s a tower, a vertical structure itself atop a mountain. To find out how they did it, I refer you back to the video.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
This week’s find isn’t a romhack specifically, but a way of playing them, both in patching and running them in an emulator, in a fairly automated way, at least if the hack you seek to play is for an N64 game, and especially if that game is Super Mario 64. It’s Parallel Launcher.
Parallel Launcher is an all-in-one solution to running N64 hacks. When you first run it, it’ll install a small Retroarch binary for its own use and set it up for exclusively for a couple of N64 emulators. You can supply the path to a folder of N64 roms and BPS patches, and it’ll try to apply patches to the roms on the fly when you try to play them.
It also has integration with the website romhacking.com, which is not connected with the hack news site romhacking.net or its follow-up romhack.ing. I’m not sure what the full extent of this integration entails, but if you have Parallel Launcher and a properly set up SM64 rom, and click on a Play Now link on a hack’s page on romhacking.com, it’ll mostly-automatically download the patch, patch the rom, and run it for you, without you having to do anything else other than allow the link to be passed from your browser to Parallel Launcher. There’s even some integration to track what stars you’ve found.
Once set up, Parallel Launcher works well! One of the biggest obstacle to playing romhacks, after sourcing the rom images themselves, is the effort and focus needed to generate them. You obtain the rom, then the patch, then the utility to do the patching. Then you run the utility, supply the location of the rom and the patch, and then roughly half the time the patching fails. If you’re using a format like BPS you’ll be told, and will then have to get the right version of the rom file or figure out how to repair yours. If you’re not using BPS or a similar kind of patch, you won’t find out until you try to run the game.
None of these steps is very hard to understand, but it’s a big hassle. While Parallel Launcher won’t help you find versions of roms, it’ll do just about everything else for you. In the way of emulators and emulation tools, it’s available for most current and popular desktop platforms. It’s a useful tool for a hack player’s box.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Another romhack! There’s lots of hacks and it’s not always easy to find one I consider notable enough to present. This week’s definitely has technical skill on its side.
Mario Adventure 2 might sound like a successor to Mario Adventure, a 2001 hack of Super Mario Bros. 3 that remakes it into an almost entirely different game. That would be great, but that’s not what this is. (And neither, I think, are related to this Mario Adventure 2.)
Mario Adventure 2 gets its name from Sonic Adventure 2. It’s a port of that game’s levels, fairly closely, into the Mario 64 engine, with some chances to Mario’s handling to accommodate 3D Mario and 3D Sonic (and his 3D friends) differences. That’s a pretty tall order!
The hack is not complete (its creators call it a demo), but unlike many WIP hacks that modify a level or two and then remain in limbo forever, Mario Adventure 2 has already converted around half the levels, the whole “Hero Side” story, starring Sonic, Knuckles and Tails. The “Dark Side” story, centering around Shadow, Rogue and Dr. Eggman, is not yet ported, but even if nothing is ever released from that, there’s a great deal to play.
Now if you know anything about these two games, your curiosity is probably piqued, not so much by how the levels from Sonic Adventure 2 were made completable by Mario, but how Mario 64’s engine could handle them at all. Sonic Adventure 2 is a Dreamcast game, but Mario 64 was made for the Nintendo 64! And it doesn’t pull emulator tricks to make them work: the game works on actual N64 hardware!
I don’t know for sure, but it seems like the game splits Sonic Adventure 2’s large levels into sections, that are loaded in as separate maps. And while the main sections of SA2’s maps are rendered in full, the many areas off the main route, that can’t be entered, are missing a lot of polygons (one of my screenshots shows this).
Replacing the emblem goals in SA2, Stars have been placed throughout each levels. The levels have far more than Mario 64’s eight Stars each, and the early levels, at least, have at least 25 of them. Some short sections of map have three stars to collect, visible at once. The remakes of Knuckle’s stages, which I remind you are non-linear and exploreable, are dense with them. Collecting a Star doesn’t kick you out of the level either, so it’s possible, though difficult, to get all the Stars in one go.
Mario 64’s engine has been changed to remove fall damage, and to allow for grinding on rails, which you’ll remember was a pretty big selling point of SA2. It hasn’t been changed to allow for rolling up steep slopes though, and Sonic’s loops had to be cheated in various ways, although you’ll also remember, I’m sure, that SA2 did some cheating of its own. Mario Adventure 2’s handling of them is probably a little less janky.
Those who’ve played Sonic Adventure 2 will remember a considerable amount of jank, and its Mario-focused counterpart reflects that. The first level, City Escape, is one of the most janky, with invisible walls blocking side-streets, and even some places that you’d assume could be passed. It’s still playable, for the most part, but there are a couple of places in Tails’ first level, Prison Lane, that rely on specific jumps to get through. Tails’ levels involved shooting enemies to open gates to progress. That aspect has been kept in Mario Adventure 2, but Mario doesn’t have missiles, sometimes the enemies are difficult to reach, and you’ll have to find an alternate way through. You’ll get stuck near the beginning of the third level unless you take advantage of a lifting platform to make a jump that doesn’t quite look possible.
If those sticking points can be fixed, then this could easily become a romhack for the ages. Let’s hope that its makers can get enough playtesters to find them all, and have enough energy to fix them. Until then it’s worth a try, but you might want to refer to a video that plays through Level 3 (like this one, two hours long) to find a way across that gap without killing all the bats.
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