In the old old old old old old old OLD* days, people wrote computer programs by either filling boxes on paper cards or punching out squares, like they did (maybe still do?) for standardized tests. The cards would be fed into card reading devices, some of them called Hollerith machines, to be read into the computer’s memory. (Asides: Hollerith machines were invented in the 1800s. IBM’s start was in making them. IBM’s website though won’t be keen to publicize that they were used by the Nazis.)
(Another aside: What do the olds mean? Old #1: before social media. Old #2: before smartphones. Old #3: before Google. Old #4: before before the World Wide Web. Old #5: before the internet. Old #6: before online services. Old #7: before home computers. Old #8, the all-caps one: before timeshares. There is an awful lot history in the early years of personal computing that gets overlooked.)
The ultimate point after all this discursion is that paper, while little used today, is a time-honored way of entering computer programs. A while after that neolithic era, when home computers first hit it big, there grew a market for programs that weren’t as big and expensive as boxed copies on store shelves. That was the age of the type-in program magazine.
It’s the same age that that Loadstar thing I keep bringing up belongs to, but truthfully it lies only on its edges, as it was a disk magazine, created specifically to bypass the trial by fire that type-in magazines subjected its users to: sitting at a keyboard for hours, laboriously entering lines of code, or even plain numbers, in order to run some simple game, novelty, or other software. Loadstar itself served as the disk supplement, that is, media that carries all the programs from a print magazine’s issue, for both Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. (That age of Loadstar stretches from issue 9 to 61.)
I don’t know when the first magazine that published software in print form was, that’s a solid fact kind of question, there definitely was a first at some point, but there’s been tens of thousands of magazines, some of them really short-lived and obscure, and there’s a great many edge cases to look out for. Mad Magazine, to offer just one example, published a type-in in one issue.
To state that solid fact definitively requires more time and resource access than I have. But a strong claim could be made for The PET Gazette.
Computer magazines used to look like this! That’s what they’ve stolen from you!
The PET Gazette’s first issue was near the end of 1979. It was more of a fanzine, with a few aspects of a science journal, than a general magazine. It served a highly motivated and focused audience, the kind who would drop $800 in 1970s money on a machine that had 4 or 8K of RAM. The kind who thought making a machine perform automated calculation or data manipulation, all by itself, seemed really really neat. (I kind of feel that way, even now.) The kind like that, or that else bought one of the even earlier kit computers, like the KIM-1, which users had to assemble from parts, soldiering iron in hand, and for which a video monitor was a hopeless extravagance.
I would say at this point that you might know PET Gazette by its rebranding in the early 80s, to COMPUTE!, title in all caps, with exclamation point. But then I would be expecting you to say “Wow, I had no idea!” But who these days even remembers Compute? (I’m not going to persist in replicating 45-year-old marketing stylization, I have difficulty making myself type Xbox.)
As its title indicates, PET Gazette focused primarily on the PETs, along with the KIM-1 which is like a sibling. Compute served a community of users of many different platforms, of like half a dozen: Commodore microcomputers of course, but also Atari 8-bits, the Apple line, the TRS-80s, the early days of the IBM PC, and at times even some more esoteric models.
Compute’s first issue. At the start, it used a period in its title instead of a bang.
Compute’s last issue. It had dropped type-ins a few years before. By this time it had dropped the exclamation point and was owned by the publishers of Omni (hence the font of its title). It got sold to the murderers of many a tech magazine, Ziff-Davis, in order to get ahold of its subscriber list.
Compute soon spun off two or three subscriptions for specific platforms, for users who wanted more than what was limited, by space reasons, to one or two programs an issue. By far the most significant of these was Compute’s Gazette, its title a tribute, to those who knows, to the Compute empire’s origins.
I’ve mentioned here before, certainly, that Loadstar lasted for a surprising and amazing length of time, 22 years. Compute’s Gazette (Internet Archive) wasn’t nearly so long-lived, but it still made it pretty far. Wikipedia claims that it survived to 1995, but really its last issue as its own magazine was in 1990; then it persisted for a bit as an insert in Compute, then as a disk-only periodical.
Look at that cover! Distinctive! Informative! Interesting!
…and the last cover. I don’t think it’s nearly as interesting, but by that point it was lucky to be a magazine at all.
Fender Tucker tells me that when Compute’s Gazette closed up, they paid Loadstar to fulfill their remaining subscription obligations, so at least they did right by their remaining customers. It was a dark day when CG perished, though, the former heavyweight of the type-in scene.
Some other type-in magazines of the time were Ahoy! (again, with an exclamation point):
Ahoy also had a distinctive design!
…and Run:
The word has arrived via the Floppy Days podcast that the Compute’s Gazette may soon return. What really happened is that James Nagle saw that the trademark had lapsed and registered it himself. There’s no continuity of editor, writer or IP with the original. Yet I still hope that Nagle’s effort, which rebrands the Gazette as supporting all retro computing platforms, succeeds. His heart is in the right place at least. Here’s their website. I hope that they at least have the sense to offer a way to enter programs other than typing them in by hand; that was always the worst thing about these magazines.
Smash Melee has had a huge amount of attention payed to it over the years, and one source of player obsession has been the Home Run Contest.
In brief: Smash Bros. games are about racking up damage to a target, measured in percent. The higher the percent, the further an attack target flies when struck. The idea of the Home Run Contest is to do as much damage to a special Sandbag character, which doesn’t move on its own, in 10 seconds, then to hit it as hard as you can, usually with a baseball bat item, to make it fly as far as possible.
The Home Run Contest has been in every Smash Bros. game since Melee, and its first implementation has lots of weird things about it. Like, if you set the game language to Japanese, you get a slightly smaller platform, which makes your distances count slightly longer.
Lots of oddities are pointed out by Youtuber “Practical TAS”, in their 26-minutes video, here. Warning: serious geekery ahead!
Let’s break down the title. “AsumSaus” is one of the best Youtubers on the subject of Super Smash Bros. Melee. He makes well-edited, entertaining videos that don’t go overboard. Overboard is hear defined as employing obnoxious editing and a speaking style that would make a morning zoo radio host say, “hey, maybe you should dial it back a little.”
AsumSaus is great, and his most popular video, which we posted here back in 2023, tells an engaging story well, about the success of aMSa, the Melee player who won championships using Yoshi, a character nearly everyone else in that scene looks down upon. Hey, if you missed that video you should go watch it now (54m). It’s enough to almost make people who (gasp!) don’t care about goofy tournament platform fighters take interest.
This video isn’t about that. In fact, I’ve been trying to not post so many Youtube videos here lately. This is the first one I’ve posted since Sundry Sunday! See, I’m trying! Josh Bycer’s doesn’t count!
AsumSaus’ video this time, his first in 10 months, is about the most emblematic Melee stage: Final Destination. The boring stage, and its symbiotic relationship with most of the roster of Melee. Specifically, the group of players who don’t want to get killed by Fox, Falco, or sometimes Captain Falcon. (20 minutes) Enjoy, if you’re of a mind to enjoy that kind of thing. If anyone could cause you to care, it’s probably AsumSaus.
Things Pvt. Skippy is not allowed to do at the Switch 2 release event, #14: Loudly read their erotic, explicit Sonic/Shadow fanfic.
#18: Spread rumors that the Switch 2 requires a new, more costly form of electricity to use.
#23: Dress in a robe, ask others in line if they’ve accepted Mario as their lord and savior. Also, they cannot set up a shrine to their Wario Amiibo.
#26: Show off the SD Micro Express card they bought online, telling people “If you don’t have one of these, you’re already dead.”
#28: Swear people to secrecy, tell them they’re a spy working for Sony, then take pictures of people in line to send to “headquarters.”
#32: Bring a blue bowl with spikes glued to the underside, then throw it at the person at the front of the line and try to take their place.
To explain: Lists of things Private Skippy is not allowed to do (usually in the U.S. Army, but also other armed forces or even other places) are an ancient form of internet humor, possibly older than the World Wide Web itself. It’s the kind of thing that would have been traded around Usenet, or even Fidonet. (Its absence from Know Your Meme proves its affected by recency bias.) TV Tropes has a page on Skippy, a claim it originated in 2001—I think it’s older but could easily be wrong—and a link to the webpage skippyslist.com, which is a broken WordPress install. Sorry Skippy.
Here is one surviving list on the Web, although part of the process of Skippy is that people add new items as they pass it around, so there is no canonical list. I should warn you that, as a very old form of internet humor, you can expect these lists to have questionable items on them, depending on who’s posting it. The list I linked also prefaces the list with a backstory. It’s entirely unnecessary: many of us know a Pvt. Skippy of some variety, even if they never served.
Working on the Loadstar Compleat project has taken up a lot of time, so I keep trying to think of ways to use the things I’ve written for it here on Set Side B. This is the introduction I wrote (edited down to the history, mostly), and a shorter piece on the Eras of Loadstar.
A photograph of long-time managing editor Fender Tucker, holding a pipe in his mouth. (Fender is an adherent of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, of the Church of the Subgenius.)
Loadstar was an incredibly long-lived computer magazine, distributed on disk, for the Commodore 64 and 128 home computers. It began in 1985 and its last issue was distributed in 2007, covering a span of 22 years. It had 250 issues of the main publication, 42 quarterly issues dedicated to the Commodore 128, and numerous side products.
About Loadstar
Loadstar was initially created at Softdisk, Inc. You might have heard of Softdisk as the prior place of work of several employees who left the company, founded id Software, and created Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, DOOM and Quake. It’s possible that some of them might remember the Loadstar guys, but it seems doubtful.
Loadstar was distributed on newsstands up to issue 72, when it switched over entirely to mail-order subscription sales. Despite this reduced exposure, Loadstar soldiered on. Starting with #32, some issues of Loadstar contained two disks of programs and information. These issues became more and more common until, beginning with Issue 43, every Loadstar contained at least two disks until the end of its run.
Loadstar published lots of different kinds of programs! The Video Pro-Titler may still be of use today, if you have need of a simple character generator!
Issue 44 began the reign of Fender Tucker, who would helm Loadstar for the next fifteen years. Fender lent the magazine a distinctive style. He’d write editorials describing the magazine as originating in the “Loadstar Tower,” a wondrous place looming over its home town of Shreveport, Louisiana. (The magazine was actually produced in a basement.) He’d also write up the adventures of his nefarious alter-ego and musician Knees Calhoon, who was listed as the author of some of Fender’s own software. Under Fender Tucker’s guidence Loadstar flourished, and garnered a devoted community of users and contributors.
According to Jeff Jones, attitudes at Softdisk were that the company’s Windows and Mac products were the future of the company, but eventually the internet came along and dashed that dream. Softdisk continued along as an ISP for a time, but around 2006 its services were taken over by another company, and it’s now long defunct. During Softdisk’s later years Loadstar continued to support a large and loyal userbase, and didn’t cost much to produce, so it chugged along well into the internet age.
As Loadstar grew, so did its community, and the technology around it. While the Commodore 64 computer was discontinued in 1994, a thriving market of add-ons and upgrades sprang up to serve its users. Probably the most notable third-party producer of Commodore peripherals was CMD, Creative Micro Designs. While Commodore themselves had made expansion memory modules for the C64, CMD took their ball and sprinted way downfield. CMD made a disk drive accelerator (JiffyDOS), powered memory units that could serve as long-term storage, accelerator boards, and even hard drives compatible with the venerable 8-bit machine. Loadstar’s staff used many of these devices in its later years to help produce their magazine.
Loadstar had a symbiotic relationship for about four years with Commodore’s own publications Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. Some type-in magazines would offer a disk supplement, containing all of the software in an issue on a computer disk and saving users from the need to type them in. Commodore had an arrangement with Loadstar to serve as the disk supplement of their magazines. This deal lasted from around issues 11 to 61, and helped bulk out Loadstar’s issues with interesting software.
Early issues of Loadstar often hosted ports of programs that originally appeared in Softdisk. One notable series of these is the Alfredo animations, a sequence of programs that depicted the travails of a stick man trying to survive a dangerous landscape. See folks, the genre didn’t start with Adobe Flash! Long after its parent Softdisk Magazine closed up shop, Loadstar published two final, original Alfredo adventures, in two of Fender Tucker’s last issues, #197 and #199.
Loadstar never distributed the Commodore versions of GEOS, Berkeley Softworks’ surprisingly successful bid to bring a mouse-driven, icon-based, Mac-like point-and-click interface to 8-bit home computers, but starting with Issue 58 and throughout the rest of its run GEOS programs were a regular fixture on Loadstar’s electronic pages. In retrospect, GEOS was done much wrong. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, Berkeley Softworks attempted to bring their OS to DOS-compatible machines with GeoWorks, only to quickly be dismissed as a budget pretender to Windows’ throne. GEOS was far from the first, and certainly not the last, Windows competitor to be steamrollered beneath Microsoft’s hardball tactics. (See: CP/M, PC-DOS, OS/2.) Judging by quantity, Loadstar may be GEOS’ biggest supporter that wasn’t Berkeley Softworks or Commodore itself.
Another company that formed an arrangement with Loadstar was Quantum Compuer Services, which served the Commodore 64 community with an online service called QuantumLink. Several early Loadstar issues came with the QuantumLink client software included on one of its disk sides. (At least one of our included issues has a copy, now useless.) Quantum eventually released a similar service for MS-DOS-based computers, and renamed themselves to America On-Line.
“AOL,” as everyone called it, become a runaway hit. They would build upon its strategy of distributing their disks far and wide, first as 3 1/2″ floppies, then as CD-ROMs, and eventually DVDs. QuantumLink was left to languish and, after a long period of decay where users complained of unmaintained upload sections and unmoderated forums, AOL unceremoniously shut it down without so much as an archive. The later history of AOL is generally known: they bought out their rival CompuServe, AOL keywords were broadcast during daytime television, it was a popular early choice for a dial-up ISP, it became the most-used ISP in the United States, and they created a hugely popular instant messaging program (AOL Instant Messager, or “AIM”). Then they underwent a disastrous merger with Time-Warner that would be hastily undone, then obscurity encroached as first the internet, and then social media, made most of it services redundant. AIM, once thought unstoppable, faded and died as more people used their cell phone’s text feature. As of this writing AOL still exists, but it’s fallen far from the days when its iconic “You’ve Got Mail!” catchphrase became the title of a Hollywood movie, proving once again, truly: what goes around, comes around. Eventually.
The premise of this movie will certainly age well. BTW, the more you find out about the history of movies, the more you come to realize this happens ALLTHETIME.
The Eras of Loadstar
The Early Issues Loadstar started as a C64 counterpart for Softdisk’s self-titled Apple II magazine. Many of its earliest programs are ports of Softdisk software.
Commodore Magazine With Issue 9, Loadstar became the official disk supplement for both Commodore Magazine and Power/Play. The programs from those periodicals helped to greatly bulk out their offerings. The arrangement lasted until Loadstar issue 61.
The Rise of Fender Loadstar’s longest-serving overseer was Fender Tucker, a kind and genuine person with an engaging writing style. Fender joined up with issue 42, and starting with the next issue, Loadstar moved to two disks a month.
Jeff Jones, Loadstar 128 & Loadstar Letter Associate Editor Jeff Jones joined sometime between issues 49 and 55 and brought some additional technical know-how to Loadstar. In addition to touching up programs and contributing software of his own, Jeff was largely responsible for Loadstar Quarterly 128, their publication catering to Commodore 128 owners, and the Loadstar Letter, a print supplement distributed along with Loadstar.
Puzzle Pages Barbara Schulak’s first program was Jump, published on Loadstar #44, but starting with issue 60 Loadstar published a monthly puzzle section that became the magazine’s most enduring feature. From then, every Loadstar had a Puzzle Page until issue 163, but the feature continued, mostly monthly, until issue 197. Barbara Schulak wasn’t the only contributor to the Puzzle Page, and there were puzzles outside of it, but Barbara was its soul.
The End of the Newsstand Edition Issue 7 was the last issue of Loadstar 128 to be distributed on newsstands, and issue 72 was the last issue of Loadstar 64 to be buyable that way. For most magazines that would have been the end, but Loadstar still had 16 years of life in it, sold entirely through subscriptions, mail order sales, and later via the internet, a testament to the faithfulness of Commodore users.
The European Age At its height around 1991, Loadstar had around 20,000 monthly subscribers. Without the free advertising provided by newsstands, by 1994 that had dropped to around 5,000. As Loadstar reached issue 100 and long years passed, it became harder to find contributions from US subscribers. Meanwhile the C64 was still going fairly strong in Great Britian, and many of the games of Loadstar from this era have a distinct demoscene feel. Loadstar also published demos, and reported on Commodore hacking circles. Loadstar would also embrace the internet, and offer issues for sale by way of their website.
Dave Moorman’s Tenure The writing was on the wall. By 2000 Loadstar had about 1,000 subscribers left, too many to just abandon, but not enough to remain profitable for their then-meager staff. Fender handed the reins off to the worthy Dave Moorman, who kept it going to 2007. Moorman was a dogged manager, and went to lengths to keep the magazine full of items, including frequently reprinting software from the magazine’s glory days. While many of Loadstar’s prior stalwart contributors didn’t switch over, Fender himself still wrote for the magazine, and kept up with it until the end.
The Tornado In 2007 a tornado struck Dave Moorman’s house, and wrecked his Loadstar-making setup. While one more issue, #250, would eke out in 2008, the 22-year run of Loadstar, last remnant of the once-mighty field of computer software periodicals, was over. Loadstar had outlived all of its sister magazines from Softdisk (including its DOS, Windows and Macintosh publications) Softdisk Inc. itself, as well as Compute, Compute’s Gazette, Commodore Magazine, Commodore Power/Play, Ahoy, Run Magazine, Family Computing, Creative Computing, UpTime and DieHard.
(I have been reminded of the value of marketing, so I have to include the $15 Loadstar Compleat package I’ve put together with the permission of J&F Publishing.)
This comes out from the halls of Metafilter, and a post there by Wolfdog. Pixelogic is a webpage where every 5×5 Nonogram puzzle (which you may know by the trademarked name Picross) is on a website, and as people solve them they’re marked off.
Part of the fun of most Nonograms is making a picture, and very few of these come out to anything. In the screenshot above 9,303,414 there looks like a crab, and the one above 9,303,408 whose number is cut off is obviously a helicopter, but the rest is pixel gibberish. It’s amazing, though, that one can make even that out of these random blobbies and garbages.
But on the flipside of that, 5×5 puzzles are really easy! It’s a simple matter to do one, and after that another, and so on, and then an hour has passed and you’ve finished hundreds. Add to that the job of just working on something with lots of other people, and you have a damn addictive time. The puzzle software is friendly too: left click to mark squares, right click to mark empties. The solver automatically marks Xs in spaces where they logically must go if you’ve filled all the spaces on a line of column. And unlike many of the Picross implementations on Nintendo systems, there’s no penalty for making wrong moves, although you’re not informed when you fill an incorrect square either.
To work on these, I suggest scrolling way down the page and finding a block of unsolved ones, as the site doesn’t filter out finished puzzles, and then working outward from there.
I realize I’ve assumed that you already know how to solve Nonograms/Picross here. A full description would be verbose and probably unneeded, especially since you can probably figure it out yourself by just looking at the solved puzzles on the site, but just in case:
You have a grid, right? Along the top and left side are numbers. The numbers indicate the runs of filled blocks in the solution of the puzzle. Take this example:
2 2 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
This horizontal line must have two sequences of filled blocks in the solution:
🟩🟩❌🟩🟩
That one was easy, but usually the full solution isn’t so, and must be deduced using the intersections of the rows and columns.
Try it out, but do it soon; more and more solvers are joining on every day, and even with 24M puzzles in the list they’ll probably churn through them all in around a month!
I think you might find it interesting or useful or entertaining, or some combination of the three, to have a list of interesting gaming websites to look through and follow. They’re all pretty cool; I’ve tried to weed out some that don’t update often, but sometimes the content on the site overrides that.
The three big indie gaming sites at the moment are Second Wind, the newly-liberated Giant Bomb, and Aftermath, even if they do annoy me greatly whenever they call blog posts “blogs.” I feel like they do it on purpose, or something. Take note that currently Second Wind does not actually have a dedicated website of their own; their internet presence is on other sites and services, especially Youtube and Discord.
Two sites I suggest avoiding are Kotaku, which is run by soulless drones, and, whenever possible, the vast array of Fandom.com sites. This is often not possible, as lots of people use them for free site hosting, but it’s frequently the case that Fandom doesn’t have its users’ interests foremost on its mind, and if a wiki creator decides to leave Fandom for green pastures, you’ll often end up competing with your old site, and it’ll come in ahead of your new site in Google searches for a long time after, maybe forever, because of their strong search engine optimization. Notably the Nethack Wiki had to fight against the ghost of their old selves for a long time, and the Fandom version of the site still, after over a decade, comes up in the first page of Google results. (A useful browser extension for Chrome and Firefox is Indie Wiki Buddy, which marks search results that turn up Fandom sites, while not removing them entirely in case they’re the only real option.)
Some other useful sites:
The Cutting Room Floor, of course, is an amazing resource, bringing together development information on thousands of games.
Hardcore Gaming 101 may be the website with the most complete information on all kinds of video games that exists, other than Wikipedia of course, and WP prioritizes general audiences, not enthusiasts.
Gaming Alexandria is preservation-focused, and hosts scans of old gaming and computer magazines, including scans of Japanese type-in computer magazines, a category that has not been well-preserved in the West despite some programmers having moved into mainstream commercial development after having gotten their start with magazine publishing.
Game Developer Research Institute collects information on a vast array of companies and hosts a number of interviews with classic gamedevs too. They also keep an informative blog (being, a series of blog posts).
Computer Archeology updates but rarely, but has useful information on several classic arcade games. They’re the site that figured out the cause of the long-standing arcade Galaga bug that sometimes cause the enemy insects to stop firing.
We’re now moving into the category of personal sites, but don’t count them out because it’s mostly one or two people who make them!
Donnie Hodges’ Website doesn’t update often, but has such a wealth of info that I can’t leave it out. Note that Hodges has come out as non-binary, but their site still keeps their pre-transition name.
Gaming Hell is lots of fun, and has old-school web design that reminds me of the ancient |tsr’s NES Archive. Their linklist was the source of several sites, in turn, in this list/
Finally, more out of a sense of memory than anything else, there’s Press The Buttons, home of the blog and podcast of my late friend Matthew Green, currently still on the internet. I don’t know what will happen to it now that he’s gone. He wasn’t the only host of the Power Button podcast. I hope the surviving members keep it going. If they do, you should follow it, too.
The gold standard of game breakdowns continues to be PannenKoek’s extremely detailed and approachable examinations of Super Mario 64, but there’s other people out there are also nerding out excessively over games.
Also of interest is a video they’ve done about “Wall Assisted Super Bouncing,” a Mario Kart DS technique that can cause you to game big air and leap over barriers under the right conditions. It’s 11 minutes, and even if (as is likely) you’re not in the Mario Kart DS TAS speedrunning scene, it may be interesting for its look at the specifics of MKDS’s engine.
I’ve seem lots of really great pinball on Youtube, even though with every extra one you watch there’s a danger Youtube will think that’s all you want to see for a while.
This particular 22-minute video is special for a few reasons. First, it’s made by Bowen of PAPA, the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association, which means you’re gonna see some really good play. Second, it’s two nice games in a row, despite the game being set to tournament settings, meaning, game rules are at their hardest or nearly so, and there are no extra balls. And third, both games achieve a respectable score, but they do so by completely different strategies. The first one goes for multiballs exclusively, and gets to over 200M mostly through jackpots. The second pursues Mansion Rooms, which is slower and a little riskier, but gets to over 300M.
Addams Family is, as the video mentions, the best-selling pinball machine of all time. It’s got several unique features to it. In many pinball games the modes mostly differ by the available shots, but Addams Family has a mode, Seance, that turns on spinning magnets beneath the playfield (“FEEL the POWER!”), so the game actually plays differently, physically, while it’s running. It’s worth a lot of points, but it’s also very easy to lose control of the ball during it.
Multiball on Addams Family, as shown, can also be worth tons of points. The Power magnets also run during it, but shots to the side ramp during it are worth a minimum of 20 million. Addams Family is from an age where ball savers are rare, if there’s any at all, so there is a very strong possibility you’ll just immediately fail out of multiball with nothing to show for it. The game does let you try to restart multiball if you earn no jackpots, but you’ll only have to balls and could well just fail out again.
High-level pinball play is about both quick reactions and careful strategy. Don’t take shots on the fly if you can help it, but try to dampen the ball’s momentum, trap the ball on the flippers, and make as many controlled shots as possible. During multiball, try to get all but one ball on the flipper you want to use the least, and use the other one to make the important shots. If the ball is on the wrong flipper, try to get it to the other flipper safely, using techniques like “post transfers.”
Good pinball takes lots of practice, and sometimes unlearning habits, but it’s a kind of play that not many real-time video games can match. For pinball’s a very honest game, there is rarely anything the game can do to covertly sabotage you (if the machine is maintained well), but its skill ceiling is infinite. You can always play better.
If it seems that a lot of the “niche” items here ending up being about Nintendo things, you’re not wrong. The fact is, lots of people talk about Nintendo, both the Nintendo of old (N64, Gamecube, GBA, DS), the Nintendo of very old (NES, Gameboy, SNES), the Nintendo of very old (Donkey Kong, Game & Watch), and once in a while, the Nintendo of even older than that. They have been making gaming equipment since the 1800s, after all!
With all that Nintendo talk, I’m positively desperate to find non-Nintendo things older than a certain age. And once in a while, I even find them.
That’s what’s served up today, a video list of 11 secret things about the Space Quest games. The absence of Space Quest games in the current era is one of the worst things about it, if there was any DOS-era game series that could stand a comeback that is IT. But in that terrible absence, here is a 27 minute collection, from Space Quest Historian, of interesting things about those games:
Included items:
The Cave Squid in Space Quest II doesn’t actually chase you: it’s a set encounter in a specific location.
In SQ6, in the German and French localizations, designer Scott Murphy rerecorded some lines he spoke as himself, in those languages.
A cheat to skip some of the Scumsoft area in SQ3.
In the Aptitude Test in SQ5, you can either look over the shoulder of another test taker to get the answers… or just answer the last choice for each question. That’ll also get you past that sequence.
Some planet names in SQ5 are obvious jokes, but one of them that seems to be a jab at rival adventure maker Lucasarts is instead (or maybe, also) a reference to the last name of a couple of employees.
A Sarien guard in SQ1, if you talk to them many times, will eventually reveal that they’re a Kings Quest fan, and six points are locked behind this easter egg, making it difficult to score a perfect game without prior knowledge. As it turns out, Ken Williams put this gag in the game himself.
Space Quest Historian insists that the games, in general, were not made harder to sell hint books. Instead, it was to increase the length of the game, as if you know exactly what to do a typical Sierra adventure can be finished in less than an hour.
The Datacorder puzzle in SQ6 wasn’t intended as copy protection. It was supposed to be clued in the game itself, but an oversight meant it was left out of the game, so the clues were printed in the manual.
In SQ5, there was an unexpected case of the game taking it easy on the player. If you don’t complete a necessary puzzle, at the very end, before escaping a spaceship set to self-destruct, the game won’t kill you as a final punchline, but actually put you back for another try.
The Duracell Bunny, better known to US players as the Energizer Bunny, in SQ4… they actually got permission to include the joke, but from the wrong people. Still they were never sued, possibly because the inclusion flew under the owner’s radar.
Rereleases of Space Quest games sometimes changed some of the pop culture references to make them less legally actionable. In all but one case, however, this was done preemptively, and no legal threat was actually made. It was just their lawyers playing it safe. The one time they got a Cease and Desist was when they included likenesses of ZZ Top in the VGA release of SQ1. They fixed this in a novel way: the interpreter program scans the play directory for alternate resource files, and if it finds them, will include them as alternate animations. They “patched” the game for later pressings by putting alternate versions of the singers, shrunk down so far as to be unrecognizable. This seemed to satisfy the group’s lawyers. But the original graphics are still in the game; if the alternate resource files are deleted (or just moved out of the directory), the ZZ Top parody will reappear.
If all of this is interesting to you, I encourage you to watch the video, where all of these things are illustrated in-game, and explained in far greater detail. Look and see!
Mr. Goof on Youtube made a video with some cool and relatively unknown things that can be done in Super Mario Galaxy. Like the ground pound move in that game has a homing function, you can hold crouch to skate backwards on ice, and there is a secret button press that can give you a speed boost at the start of Cosmic Mario races. But none of those things are what they claim is the most obscure thing in the game.
The video is titled “Super Mario Galaxy’s Most Obscure Mechanic,” which is a bit wrong. It’s not a mechanic, or mechanism, it’s just a move with no real gameplay purpose. If you stand near water and jump, Mario will dive into the water with a special animation. That’s it. It’s cool, but pretty useless. Still, it’s nice to see it in action.
Here’s the video (7 minutes). Now, go forth and win Mario-related trivia contests, if they happen to ask a question about this extremely specific behavior.
And The Greatest Foe (a particular frog in the swamp, 2 minutes)—but Youtube’s awful policies think it’s made for kids, despite the frog getting murdered bloodily at the end, so they made it unembedable. YOUTUBE HAS DONE A STUPID THING, LET THIS ALLCAPS MESSAGE STAND IN TESTAMENT TO THIS RIDICULOUS FACT.
