Zork I and Planetfall With The Edge Taken Off

Infocom text adventures in the classic style have this interesting thing they do where you explore interesting locations and solve puzzles in the rooms, but there’s also some miscellaneous things you have to do to keep yourself alive. Resource management.

Later Infocom games tended to go much easier on this kind of puzzle, but they were, then and now, a source of frustration to players, and that kind of difficulty termed friction by some, isn’t currently in fashion and can be excluding to new players.

Zork I in particular had two such elements: the need to keep a light source going in the underground at all times or else stumble around in the dark and soon get eaten by grues, and its carrying limit, which forced players to ascend to the White House frequently to deposit their treasures in the Trophy Case.

Similarly Planetfall, that game what has Floyd the robot in it, requires your character keep themself fed to stay alive, which is something of a distraction from the game’s mysteries. It also removes some ways the player can block themselves from winning, and removes some of the ways to die, in the name of fairness.

There are a couple of Github projects that took the publicly-released source code and removed these portions of the game. All of the rooms are still there, but the lamp has so much energy that it probably won’t run out, the player can carry much more and won’t fumble with the items they’re carrying unless they carry a huge amount, probably more items than there is in the game.

Just to let you know, I’m not yet aware of any such project to make the Babel Fish puzzle in the game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy less infuriating.

Zork I Modernized and Planetfall Modernized (github)

Identifying Luck in Mario Party 8

ZoomZike’s back with another epic-length exhaustive examination of the hidden mechanics and math behind a Mario Party title, this time the Wii game Mario Party 8. At three hours and 34 minutes it’s not as long as the nearly five-and-a-half hour video on Mario Party 7, but it’s not any less detailed.

I can’t think of any more detailed descriptions of the hidden mechanics of such a complex game as these. The time and effort it takes to make them suggests mania on the part of the creator, but I’m still glad they do! It’s fascinating the care that these apparently-chaotic games were made with, and how their secrets were discovered by attentive players. I suggest not watching it all in one sitting, but in segments over several days. If you care about the subject at all, that is. But as should be evident, I do care, and I think you might as well if you’re interested in game design and give it a chance.

Identifying Luck in Mario Party 8 (Youtube, 3h 34m)

Something About Youtube Ads

This is only incidentally about video games, but games are frequently advertised on Youtube.

You might have noticed a particular Youtube ad that, for whatever reason, you might want to make a record of. Or you want to watch it again to get details; maybe you want to save a local copy with youtube-dl or yt-dlp for some purposes, maybe to remix. Or maybe for some reason even vote on it, or leave a comment on it.

A secret fact about Youtube ads is that they’re all secretly just normal Youtube videos that have been registered with the ad system to put them into rotation. Every video you see on Youtube has its own 11-character ID, and ads are among them. If you know an ad’s ID, you can load it like any other video by putting it after the string:

https://youtube.com/watch?v= 

in the URL.

How can you get an ad’s ID? When it’s playing, pause it (one of the few things you can do in the player when an ad is being shown), then right-click the video and select Stats For Nerds.

That will get you various bits of troubleshooting information about the video currently being played:

Where it says Video ID/ sCPN, that code after it, that’s the ad’s ID! That’s the code you paste at the end of the URL line to get to the video’s landing page. You can select it right out of the info box with the mouse and copy it to the clipboard with CTRL-C:

Notice, the ad video itself is unlisted. It isn’t always, but it’s rare for an ad to appear in Youtube’s discover interface anyway. Also, this video doesn’t have voting disabled. It’s off the bottom of the screen here, but its comments are even open. An amusing aspect of this is, before I got to watch this ad as a normal video, Youtube served me a different ad immediately before it.

Because of this, if you find a silly, ridiculous or awful ad, you can find its page on Youtube and watch it again, tell others about it, sometimes even leave comments that probably no one will ever read.

For example. Here’s an infamous video that made the rounds some months ago. “Give this man seven seven draws!” (The caption says 777 draws.)

“Is that not enough? Give him some legendary Heroes at well!” I’m confused as to what a “draw” is, or why I’d want 777 of them, but a random lady in a business suit told it to me so it must be important!

It’s been labeled as unlisted and comments are turned off, but they didn’t bother to mark the video as non-embeddable. The ad campaign is over I think, but the video is still on Youtube, where it could possibly stay until the sun grows dim. The page says it’s currently been seen 3.6M times but it has no vote score, so it seems that getting served as an ad increases its view count.

This video, with the descriptive name “MLV109 EN 1920×1080 PC,” promoting the game “Grand Mafia” showcases the adventures of a poor Level 1 Crook, who’s constantly being turned down in his sudden marriage proposals to Hot Babes and Ex-Girlfriends because his level is low compared to the high level types that he’s surrounded by.

Hero Wars has been a heavily advertised game for months, sometimes with pretty gross ads. Badly animated blue hero guy is constantly injured by all the monsters and gods in his dumb generic fantasy world because he never went to school and learned about the important math concept of greater than. Because of that, his girlfriend got turned into a toilet and smashed to pieces. Stay in school, kids!

F-Zero 99 User Names, Good and Bad

I’m trying to ease up on Youtube links, which I’ve come to realize take up a lot of the content of this blog by weight. I probably won’t be too successful at this, as it’s become a lot harder to find interesting written content on the internet, though it was never really easy.

I’ve been playing a lot of F-Zero 99 lately. I’ve been working on posts introducing the game, which is really great I think, but that kind of content (ugh the C word) takes time to write and check.

So in the meantime, enjoy/cringe at this collection of fun, and bad, handles spotted in the game. Of course, such a determination of quality is inherently subjective. But I think you’ll find that its lack is easier to adjudicate.

  • Ganondoof,
  • â—†El Guapoâ—† (I like to think it’s a Cat Town reference)
  • Hootcifer (Owl House)
  • Valnar (Grandia II)
  • Ghost Cake
  • POWBlock
  • GimmieFife
  • ManChild30 (ah, honesty)
  • Snautilus
  • Gaudimann
  • SmileyBone (a Bone fan I see)
  • adorabunny
  • Mamasaurus
  • GIANTROBOT (there’s something to be said for pure enthusiasm)
  • Damitbobby
  • SnickerRoo
  • AAAAAAAAAH (I counted the As to make sure I wrote it right)
  • MissHeart (speaking for all the fem names in this list, takes a lot of guts to express girliness in this environment even if there’s no voice chat)
  • Moi
  • Cheesemage
  • Flarky (it’s fun to say!)
  • Chibi-Nini
  • LordFeh
  • Espurrator
  • GudNameGuy
  • Goooose
  • PixieVolt
  • Malo (taking time off from his shop)
  • Need4Sneed
  • Boisterous
  • Apostrophe
  • fax-kun
  • koppa (I hope this was intended as a Shiren reference)
  • HALLOWEEN! (I assume they only play one day a year)
  • Frizbeee
  • Bubbline
  • Orcustra
  • Lonk (a fellow GDQ viewer)
  • PeterMeh
  • lovemykids (I assume this is a pure statement of affection and not a demand)
  • TheKraggle (Lego Movie references are welcome)
  • DadMode7
  • SisterDoom
“Waddle DIO always comes first!”

Obnoxious names, much less in number thankfully:

  • Hugh Jass
  • BON9ERMan
  • Gotenks (what is this, 2002?)
  • Jeb Bush (what is this, 2016? and terrible?)
  • Wet Shart (I am opposed to this word and all that it stands for)
  • MAGA KING (Please go jump in a hole until your brain develops, if it ever will)

F-Zero 99 is not a fitting stage for such lusers. Get out of here with that sub-Sephiroth378 crap.

Don’t be like MAGA KING. If you’re going to be ignorant, at least have the decency to be quiet about it–also, less importantly, maybe try not sucking at F-Zero 99 so bad lol.

Note: while Nintendo continues to gamely update their blocklists to prevent newly-discovered ways to express slurs, they aren’t perfect, and I’ve seen a couple of outright offensive names. Those don’t even get the dignity of being present in my list of bad handles.

Sundry Sunday: Pest Protector from Rhythm Heaven

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Usually Sundry Sunday is for things related to games, not games themselves, but this is fun and random so why not?

The WarioWare people have made some weird games. Nowadays they seem to be focused on realizing the software products of Mario’s moneygrubbing alter ego and his disreputable gang of sorta-friends, but they have another series, Rhythm Tengoku, known in (some) English speaking territories as Rhythm Heaven.

Every single Rhythm Heaven game is a joy, from Karate Man to the Final Remix, but my favorite is probably Packing Pests, a.k.a. Pest Protectors.

Your onscreen surrogate is Employee 333-4-591032, working for the suspiciously-named Spider-Free Candy Company. And, well, see for yourself (three minutes):

Your nemesis

No Rhythm Heaven mini game is much explained beyond its directions, but all of them tell a story by their details. Your character is a new hire. We know he works for Spider-Free Candy by the poster on his wall when the Wii version is played in widescreen. We know he’s creeped out by spiders by what happens if you accidentally clutch one or let one by your guard. And going by their faces we know the spiders try to leap into the box out of a manic kind of joy. They aren’t hostile! They just live to give you a hug, and to leap into boxes so as to give random other people hugs! Sadly, the demands of capitalism, and by that those of your paycheck, are to deny them in their life’s purpose.

WIZARDReplaY

Wizardry used to be the most popular computer game in the world.

It has fallen on hard times recently. Creators SirTech released the terrific Wizardry 8 but then almost immediately closed up. The name is currently owned by a Japanese developer, who make games in the classic style but they’re still quite different, chasing old ghosts instead of trying to adapt the idea for new generations.

A full examination of Wizardry will have to wait for another time, but until then there’s a repackaging of the original Apple II versions available from the Total Replay folks. It’s made to run off of a ProDOS-formatted hard drive, words that themselves form a fearsome incantation, but you can still play it emulated. And should!

It includes an update of the original Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, plus the successor scenarios Night of Diamonds and Legacy of Llylgamin, plus five fan-made scenarios. It also includes WizPlus, a character editor, but diehards won’t use that. It’s cheating!

To explain Wizardry in summary, it took the ideas of early Dungeons & Dragons and adapted them to a dungeon exploration simulation with the same kind of theoretical basis. In D&D, if a character dies and there’s no way to revive it, it’s gone: no backsies. And sometimes revivals fail, and the character is gone anyway. And the dungeon in a genuinely treacherous place. If your party wipes, to even try to revive them, you have to create a new party of adventures, take them in, find the deceased party’s corpses in the dungeon, and either use magic to revive them there or drag them back to town to have the Temple of Cant do it.

If this sounds forbidding to current sensibilities, it certainly is! But that’s the point. Because of it, it’s about as close as you can get to traditional RP-gaming as you can get on a computer, even more so that official D&D products. Roguelikes come close, but since you only play as a single character in most of them they still don’t quite fit that electronic bill.

Wizard Replay (Apple II, Internet Archive)

Pixelfont

Pixelfont is a neat web tool that will take an image you provide, laid out in the proper format (which you have some control over, like character width and height) and will turn it into a pixel TrueType font for you to use! The gamedev applications of this should be obvious.

This isn’t the first free online font-building tool of this nature. The classic in the field is Fontstruct, which can also produce pixels that aren’t square, and can even extend outside of their cells, but also shows ads (although unobtrusive ones) and doesn’t let you import an image. Still, both are rather of use, or at least are fun to play with!

PixelfontFontstruct

Figuring Out Kakariko Village’s Unemployment Rate

MiyaTRT figured it out. Karariko’s Unemployment Rate. In both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom.

You might disagree with their methodology. Like in BotW he declares that Paya is unemployed even though she is obviously training to become village leader after Impa retires. But it’s still an entertaining video, and probably will tell you some things about Chicken Town’s NPCs that you didn’t know before, like that in BotW one of the townsfolk stamps on one of their neighbors crops at night!

Kakariko Village Has A 6.03% Unemployment Rate (Youtube, 7 minutes)

The Complete Script of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

Not only is it everything in the game, including unused dialogue, but it’s not a text file on Pastebin, GameFAQs or Github, but on its own website, at dialoguetree.net! This means, when its domain expires, it’ll be gone from the web. Maybe the Internet Archive can rescue it….

If you’re not familiar with it, Thousand-Year Door is widely regarded as the best of the Paper Mario games. Not only does it update the game system of the original Paper Mario with all kinds of new ideas, but it has a fairly brilliant story given its having to work with Mario lore, and it has hilarious writing and memorable characters. Super Paper Mario, that followed it, has its charms, but a somewhat lesser story. And after SPM, it seems Nintendo decided that they weren’t fond of the branching-off of Mario lore that the Paper Mario games was doing, so games after that didn’t have as much of their own continuity.

This is the game where Mario joins a pro wrestling federation as “The Great Gonzales,” where he solves a murder mystery on a train (with a particular NPC who is slightly menacing somehow!), and has one of the best uses of Luigi from among all the Mario games: while you’re on your journey to rescue Peach, it turns out that Luigi is on his own weird adventure, in the “Waffle Kingdom,” that you only find out about from talking with him. Luigi his own crazy partners that accompany him, who have their own opinions about his adventure. Here is the page on dialoguetree.net that lists that part of the script–needless to say, it is spoilers, and if you plan on playing TYD you probably should experience it there first.

Dialogue Tree, Home of Game Scripts (although so far only Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door)

Playing Fortnite As A Pacifist & As A Friend

In many kinds of games, one of the most difficult playstyles to pull off successfully is the pacifist: a character who either (according to its community) doesn’t harm, or doesn’t kill, any other character in the game. Lots of games have some form of violence as their primary verb, so eschewing all of that is choosing to make (your own) life harder.

A game in which pacifism is particularly difficult, yet possible, is Nethack. It’s a “tracked conduct” in that game, meaning, when your game ends, you’re informed as to if you played that way. There’s a page on the Nethack wiki all about it. Back on GameSetWatch I related a story, from a Usenet post, where a player won as a pacifist. Since then, many people have ascended (Nethack’s term for winning) as a pacifist. It’s hard, possibly the hardest single conduct, but there’s still lots of ways to take care of opponents without killing them, including let your pet do it. Nethack gives players ludicrously many possible actions, and there’s almost always a way.

There is another conduct, “never hit with a wielded weapon,” but it’s not necessarily much harder, since you can kill things with it, you just have to use other tools, or your fist. Monks, who fight best with martial arts, find that the best way to play anyway.

This is all a digression, because it’s hard to shut me up about Nethack, but it also serves as a segue. How about Fortnite? It’s a game where 100 people are dumped into a space and the only way to win is to be the last survivor. By definition, you can only win at it if everyone else dies, so they have to have an accident. Not a mafia-style “accident,” but a genuine one.

As it turns out, Fortnite even has an achievement for it, although its reward is laughably small. And it’s not so much that it’s hard, but relies heavily on chance. The video that follows then expands the subject a bit: it is possible to befriend another player, whose main objective is to kill you?

Searching for Humanity in Fortnite (Youtube, 30 minutes)

The November Nethack Tournament!

The replacement for the old dev/null tournament, the November Nethack Tournament is on! Get yer armor and weapons, read your spellbooks and start testing those items! Maybe you’ll find a Wand of Wishing on the first floor? Probably not, but there’s all kinds of crazy D&D-ish adventures to be had this month, so get ‘hacking!

The November Nethack Tournament (tnnt.org)

Super Mario Bros. Wonder Halloween Music

Not to keep banging the drum about the new Mario game, but there are a number of what we might call “music levels” in the game, and a couple in particular fit in with the spirit of the day. Here they are: Pumpkin Party and A Night At Boo’s Opera (length: 3 minutes). This is an edited-down version of a 28-minute compilation of all of the game’s music sequences, on Youtube.