I’m opening this post with a special message to any anthropomorphic animal video game characters who happen to be reading this. As we will see, they rate this special prologue quite highly, and so it will make us very popular to any Dottys or Apollos in our audience, being exactly the sort of thing they want to hear. In the secret, inner language of their minds, I’m sure it confirms all their biases and makes them feel good about themselves:
Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series has a lot of weird systems in them. Some games wear the grass down according to character walking patterns; all the games have the “Stalk Market,” a risky way to make a lot of money; most of the games have a lost-and-found; and so on.
A system that was in the first game, and I’m not sure was ever adapted for later games (but then it might have been) was letter-writing, not just to other players in the same village, but to the villagers. They’d save the letters you wrote them and show them off to other players if they moved to another town, and even write you back. Of course, parsing and intelligently responding to any text, no matter the language, was beyond computers of the time (and despite what AI enthusiasts will tell you, still isn’t), so the game has to fake it in some way. But, how?
Well, what is the purpose of writing letters to characters in the game? It gives villagers something interesting to show people when they move to their villages, and, it’s a roleplaying exercise for the writer, a way to pretend the animal denizens of your town are real people and not simulated game mechanics present to make the game seem less empty.
Both of these design goals work best if the person writing the letter actually writes real letters, and not random jumbles of characters, so Animal Crossing has a mechanism to reward players for writing what appear to be real letters, and not placeholder gibberish, and its system of ranking text to attempt to reward actual letter-like writing is quite complex. It looks for punctuation that looks generally appropriate, capital letters after sentence-ending punctuation, triples of characters that commonly appear in English, and sequences of characters followed by spaces that approximate the word lengths of English. Of special interest: these are elements that have to be tweaked by language, and so they pose a special challenge to localization.
Hunter R., popular Animal Crossing Youtuber, released a video that explains exactly how GC Animal Crossing scores letters written to villagers. As it turns out, the text that scores the very best looks a lot like that in the preamble to this post, up above. Go figure! Here is his description (10 minutes):
Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven games are still a bit obscure, but have a passionate fanbase. They share design sensibilities with the WarioWare series, which is because both share a character designer, Ko Takeuchi. They both have a distinctive clean-line look, and a similar sense of humor.
About four years ago, some of those fans made one of those reanimation compilations of the series, and the fruits of their labor is unusually keeping in spirit of the original, which itself samples many different art and musical styles. The reanimation feels like it could have been one of the remixes from the games itself.
Speaking of, the reanimation covers all of the remixes, of all of the games in the series, with the result that the full sequence is eighteen minutes long! It’s quite faithful to the originals, despite the vastly different animation styles, and it even scored an appreciative comment from Takeuchi himself! Here it is, but be warned: you’ll watch it for a while, then see one of the videos mention it’s only half over, and you’ll think to yourself, no way:
An aside, a different reanimation project near to my heart, but unrelated to video games, is the highly-memeable 2004 collaboration that animated They Might Be Giants’ Fingertips (6 minutes, original page). Note, in its original Flash incarnation, different elements would be selected on every play, an aspect that is unfortunately lost in these renderings.
I found out about this program that runs in the background and plays time- and season-appropriate Animal Crossing music. It’s free, there’s versions for Windows and Mac on the site, and I found a copy on the Arch depository so there’s obviously a version for Linux too. It even has a rain option.
Pretty simple today, but it’s free and fun and free. It’s freeee!
How long has it been since you thought of TF2? I played it a bit, enjoyed it for a while, but in the end FPSes aren’t really my thing. Guns and shooting people, realistically, even in a heavily stylized and humorous way, not for me. But I can respect all the work that went into it, and it’s a landmark of both gaming and gaming culture.
Team Fortress 2 has an official comic that lays out the story of the game, such as it is. It had six issues, then it just trailed off in 2017. Well, they finally made one more, to wrap it up. The game’s not done yet no, people will probably be playing Team Fortress 2 until the world collapses, and the stories of those many games are the real saga of TF2. But there is a backstory to all those stories, and it’s told in those comics.
At the end it even has a holiday theme. Seven years later, Soldier breaks Merasmus out of prison, and then tells him the true story of why The Administrator has BLU and RED fight each other. Well, kind of. Then the Korean mafia gets involved. Merasmus dies, but comes right back as a ghost, because he’s Merasmus. Other things happen.
Then we go to Scout’s house for Smissmas. Find out what happens next yourself, but I will give you the panel near the end with all the mercs together. Because it’s Smissmas Eve, and a fitting coda to the entire Team Fortress 2 thing.
Look at all the Sandviches! But, uh… which one is Pyro? Is that a delicate question?
By the way, if you choose to download that CBR it’s a doozy, it’s over three-quarters of a gigabyte because the images are all saved as PNGs.
In Mario Party games, the most dreaded spaces tend to be the Bowser Spaces, where the King of the Koopa himself intervenes to ruin your, or even all the players, day(s). It’s pretty consistent overall: prepare to lose a number of coins, or even one of your Stars, those game-winning MacGuffins.
But what you might not know is that, usually, if you land on one of his spaces and you don’t have any coins or Stars, Bowser usually gives you a small number of coins instead! It’s one of the series’ many catch-up mechanisms, designed to keep trailing players in the game.
In this video (9 minutes), Nintendo Unity shows us the result of a destitute player landing on a Bowser space throughout many of the games in the series. You see? He’s not so bad after all! Now if we could only do something about his kidnapping habit, it’s hard to put a friendly face on that one.
Despite the words’ lack in the title, the two videos linked here, both made by Some Body, are all about roguelike behavior, and likely have implications for Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon engine generally, from which the Rescue Games derive.
In terms of depth, this post is rated 4 out of 5: highly detailed information for obsessed fans and game designers.
And, the second (44m), it goes further into the weeds and is longer:
So, here’s a tl;dw overview of the first video. Despite the length, this is really only a brief summary! Some Body got their information by reverse engineering the games’ code, so it should be considered authoritative.
PMD has three times of actions, moving, attacking and using items. First they try to use an item–if there is no item to use, or the situation isn’t appropriate, or there’s a random component and they choose not to, they fall through to attacking. If there’s no one appropriate to attack, they fall through to moving or wandering. If they’re not pursuing a target and aren’t wandering, they wait in place.
Awake Pokemon try to reach a target: team members try to reach the leader (you)*, enemies try to reach a party member of yours. If they are following someone, they try to reach the target by default moving diagonally before moving orthogonally. This is good to know, and an effective strategy, since it’s harder to escape a cardinal-adjacent Pokemon than a diagonal-adjacent one. If a Pokemon has a target in sight but can’t move towards towards it, it doesn’t move.
(* Note: for teammates, this assumes the “Let’s Go Together” tactic is in effect. Generally, tactics settings are covered in the second video.)
No Pokemon can move towards a target they can’t see. Sight in Blue & Red Rescue Team is two spaces around them, or throughout a lit room they are in plus one space into corridors. Of course, invisible targets can’t be seen, even if they’re nearby. Note, a quirk of the Mystery Dungeon series generally: when standing in the first space of a corridor, you can only see slightly into the room, but everyone in the room can see you. While your default sight range in darkness is two spaces in the PMD1 games, instead of MD’s standard 1 space, you’re still a bit blind when moving into rooms. Notably, that two space distance around you is a square, so in corridors with bends in them you get a bit extra sight distance.
Now comes the interesting part (to people who are as obsessed with roguelikes as I am): what happens if a Pokemon loses sight of its target? In PMD1, it considers the last four locations the Pokemon was in, and tries to go to the one it was visible in most recently. Note in bent corridors, it becomes harder for a character to lose its target.
If the target is four turns outside of the follower’s sight, it has lost track of it, and the follower begins wandering randomly. This can happen if the Pokemon has never had a target (none has come into sight), or the target or follower teleports, the target moves over terrain the follower cannot cross, or the target moves away when the follower is occupied, or, due to the variety of events that can happen in the Mystery Dungeons, other ways.
Followers without targets wander randomly. When they spot a target, they cease moving randomly and pursue it. But if still wandering, in rooms, they pick a random exit, go to it and go down the corridor. In a corridor, they follow it until they reach a room (then entering it), or they reach an intersection. At an intersection, we see an interesting behavior: PMD1 occured before Chunsoft switched over to making wanderering monsters pick random directions at corridor intersections! In later Mystery Dungeon games, including later Pokemon Mystery Dungeons, wandering monsters go straight in intersections if they can. This is behavior that can be relied upon, but not in PMD1.
Outmatched Pokemon can decide to flee, essentially, moving away from their targets instead of towards. In rooms, they pick the exit furthermost from their pursuer, unless they moves them towards that pursuer; then they just try to get away as best they can, likely remaining in the room. A quirk of this: sometimes a fleeing monster breaks for an an exit that is more distant from the target, but not away from at attacker, giving it a free hit. The circumstances around this are complicated: the explanation begins at 7:16 in the first video.
For attacking, Pokemon have up to four moves, and a normal “attack.” This generic attack is not part of the main Pokemon game series. It was present in the first two PMD games, but after that became less effective. In the fourth and fifth PMD games, the normal attack only does five points of damage, and in the Switch remake of Rescue Team, it does no damage at all; it’s only a tool for passing time. But we’re still in the realm of PMD1, where “normal attacks” are not only useful but frequently used, because they don’t consume any PP.
Attacks are chosen based on a weighted average of all the usable moves. Each move has its own weight value; the normal attack weight’s varies according to the number of other moves available.
Ranged attacks are an interesting case. If a Pokemon has a ranged attack, and an enemy that can be attacked at a distance, it triggers the attack routine, where it picks a move from those available, but then only actually performs the move if the attack can reach its target. This can result in an attacker passing up opportunities to attack while an opponent approaches it. Out of fairness, room-range attack moves are only used by the AI when adjacent to an enemy.
Items have a bunch of minutiae associated with their use by the AI, but a lot of it is pretty ordinary. A few highlights: teammates can throw held negative status equipment at enemies, wild Pokemon start using items at Level 16, and there is only one Orb that wild Pokemon can use, and teammates can’t use it: the Rollcall Orb, for them, summons a number of other wild Pokemon into adjacency with them.
Over on Bluesky there’s an extremely interesting thread by Max Nichols, that reveals a number of groups that are often thought of as divisions of Nintendo are, in fact, separate companies!
A LOT of the companies that we think of as "Nintendo companies" were actually external studios that happened to work closely with Nintendo.SRD, despite programming basically all of Nintendo's flagship games and being physically located inside Nintendo's offices, was independent until 2022.
It’s a good idea to click through and read the whole thread, and there’s a number of people among the respondents, as well as Max Nichols himself, who are likely worth following if you’re on that platform. One of them, Hyrule Interviews, has this quote from old Nintendo of America employee, and idol of millions of preteen NES addicts, Howard Phillips:
SRD is such a strange case. When Phillips talks about working with external programming teams to develop arcade games, they’re talking about companies like Ikegami Tsushinki, who programmed Donkey Kong for them based off of Shigeru Miyamoto’s design. Brought into context with Nintendo’s “independent subsidiaries,” it becomes evident that they never really stopped doing that, but became more careful that they had the rights over whatever was produced.
It’s also interesting to put this into context with:
Rare, who came to work very closely with Nintendo for Donkey Kong Country and all during the N64 era, but then parted ways and was bought out entire by Microsoft. Rare still made games for other platforms during the 16-bit era, releasing Championship Pro-Am for the Genesis and versions of Battletoads for SNES, Genesis, and even for arcades.
Argonaut Software, who worked with Nintendo to make the 1st party release Star Fox and then-unreleased Star Fox 2.
Intelligent Systems, developers of Advance Wars, Fire Emblem and Paper Mario, among other games.
HAL and Game Freak, which are other companies Nintendo has close relationships with but are technically separate. HAL has released mobile games like Part-Time UFO; Game Freak made Drill Dozer and Pocket Card Jockey.
And as pointed out in the thread, Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Nintendo’s megahit series Kirby and Super Smash Bros., has never been a Nintendo employee! He created both series while working for HAL, then broke away and worked as a freelance game director.
It causes one to wonder: is Nintendo’s reluctance to staff up on the people who actually construct their games old-fashioned, very modern, or just idiosyncratic of them?
Caves of Qud, after over a decade of development, finally reached a 1.0 release and has, for now at least, become the toast of the more-enlightened gaming internet. Of course there will people who will look at its time-based graphics and look down on it, and go back to their games of Call of World of Fortnight Among Us Craft Duty League. But if you’re here, then there’s a good chance that you get what’s special about roguelikes. And not just roguelikes, but classic roguelikes: heavily randomized, turn- and tile-based, and challenging. Hence, Caves of Qud.
Honestly, the roguelike scene is so large now that no one person could reasonably be expected to keep track of all of it. But there is no need to; others hold aloft that particular torch. Here’s a couple of videos, then, on getting started in Caves of Qud.
Publisher Kitfox Games (who also publish the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress) sponsored a video with “Getting Started” right in its title. Here it is (18 minutes):
It contains information on the different modes, the best starting location for beginners (Joppa), basic controls, navigating around the starting town, how to get around the world map (reminiscent of Alphaman!), how to spend kill points, how to read things, how to examine Artifacts, how to experiment with things (even if it gets you killed sometimes), how to steal things, performing the water ritual, and some combat tips.
Another, slightly longer at 24 minutes, intro video is by Rogue Rat:
It covers ranged weapons, the town of Joppa, Truekin, what to do when you get lost, some different skills to learn, gaining levels from giving books to a specific NPC, using its Crawl-type Autoexplore feature and other topics. Rogue Rat did a longer, more basic, intro video (34m) last year that went over many of the same topics as the first video here.
I am SO ENVIOUS. Kit & Krysta, formerly of the official Switch video podcast Nintendo Minute, currently of their own projects and Youtube channel, got cell phone video of an amazing place, a location in Tokyo somewhere that gamedevs sometimes meet at, and is crammed tightly with game memorabilia. It’s almost a museum all to itself, and unlike the Nintendo Museum, seems like they don’t mind video footage escaping their confines, although on the other hand this doesn’t seem to be open to the public. It doesn’t look like a lot of people could fit in there at once, anyway!
I usually steer well clear of the hard sell, or “prompt for engagement,” when it comes to asking you to follow links and view videos from here. I figure if you’re interested you’ll click through, and if you’re not, then maybe tomorrow. But I’m breaking through that reserve just this once, as this place is amazing. You really have to see this if you have any interest in Nintendo, APE, Pokemon, Dragon Quest or their histories (12 minutes):
Fact: even after the disastrous life of the Wii-U, Miis still exist on the Nintendo Switch, and even though a lot less fuss is made about them now, there are still games that support them.
There are also games that used to support them but no longer do. The version of Super Mario Galaxy on Super Mario 3D All-Stars doesn’t let you select a system Mii to use as the file icon. You’re limited to one of the Mario characters provided! It’s a shame that. But, Nintendo Switch Sports, Smash Ultimate, and of course Miitopia supports them, as do four other games on the platform.
I’ve actually been through the process explained in the below video, by CJCat, which involves using Amiibo to transfer Miis over one by one from a Wii-U that had a Mii collection brought over using the Wii import channel. We played a lot of Wii, and it’s nice to know all the goofy characters we made, and the memories they carry, are on the Switch, even if few games use them any more. I hope the Switch 2 doesn’t forget about them, and that it makes them easier to bring over!
The Japanese versions of both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom have hundreds of characters in several fictional cultures. User Chubby Bub over on zeldawiki.com has a couple of spreadsheets collecting much of the naming inspiration of both these games’ many characters, and has put them up on Google Docs! Here’s the one for Breath of the Wild, and here’s the one for Tears of the Kingdom.
That’s all this time, but if you’re interested in this information it’s a lot to get through. They have information on character names, map names, the shrine Monks, monsters, items and quite a bit more! And if this isn’t that interesting to you? Well, we’re a daily blog here, so check back tomorrow!
Now that the release of the game is some distance behind us, it seems apparent that, after all the videos about death machines and Korok torture have run their course, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t have as much meme longevity as Breath of the Wild had. This is probably because BotW got some of the categories of video (like harassing Yiga) out of peoples’ systems, and also how brightly the Zonai device roundup compilation flame burnt for a while. Even Wolf Link’sminimalist run collection has slowed to a halt lately.
This is why I was pleased to see a video appear yesterday from MiahTRT both telling and elaborating upon how many Bokoblins there are in Tears of the Kingdom. The brief answer is 3,509 in the various tiers. Some of them can advance in power through the game due to the game’s hidden experience mechanic, a carryover from Breath of the Wild, that causes the monsters in the game to become more powerful depending on your actions in the game. (It does not increase Link’s power, although it may cause stronger items to generate.)
It’s a short video, at about four minutes, and unlike many videos seeking to stretch themselves out to increase ad revenue, it gets right to the point in answering its question. Thanks, MiahTRT!
