After yesterday’s exploration of a huge collection of antique electro-mechanical amusement machines, it seemed meet to drag out a little video I’ve been aware of for a while, a demonstration of a Piccadilly Circus-style redemption machine made by Konami, amusingly named Piccadilly Gradius (2 minutes).
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of this strange entry in the Gradius series on the internet, just a stub on a couple of wikis. Piccadilly Circus itself seems to be a Konami series, only a little older than Gradius really. Most of them seem to be simple roulette-style machines where you stop a light on a number to win a prize. The Gradius one makes it into a journey to get a spaceship to the end of a course.
It’s hard to believe, but an “arcade” didn’t used to mean video games. Across “the pond,” to trade in ludicrous understatement, in “old blighty,” there is an amazing collection of old-style mechanical machines. Northern Introvert has an ‘alf-hour video exploration of them that makes for fascinating viewing!
This Youtube video is a follow-up to Choa’s 40 Sonic Adventure 2 Facts, which we posted about recently. Unlike the standard lists of this nature that litter the internet, most of the ones in these two videos are genuinely interesting, and paint a picture of a team trying a lot of things to make their take on the Sonic series work, while pressed for time.
For those not acquainted, Sonic Adventure had a weird structure, with free-exploration Adventure Fields, with permanent powerups to find, NPCs to talk to, and even a few subquests; and more demanding Action Stages. Each action stage had an entrance somewhere in an Adventure Field. Sonic Adventure had six playable characters, each with an entirely different style of gameplay! Sonic running, Tails racing with Sonic, Knuckles treasure hunting, Amy being chased by robots, Omega (itself one of Eggman’s robots!) blowing things up, and Big the Cat… fishing.
What a weird game. And you can tell just from playing it, the weirdness extended to its development. Characters can enter parts of courses intended for other characters. There are secret areas that seem like a holdover from early development, that sometimes can still be entered. Voice lines and animations that are very obscure, or even impossible to trigger without mods, remain in the game. Choa’s video is not a complete listing of these oddments, but it’s certainly a good introduction to them.
Here is the page, just to get the link out of the way. It was written by sdomi back in 2023. They were also one of the people who presented the talk from a couple of days ago about turning Chromebooks into more-useable laptops.
Part of the page describing the wholly-questionable project.
People who know what both Minecraft and bash are are right now exclaiming WTF. People who just know what Minecraft, of which there are very many, might be wondering why writing a server in bash is such a big deal. People who only know what bash is… well, you should remember to take your medication, and remember your gerontologist appointment on Thursday.
bash is the primary scripting language over in the Linux Dimension. Think of it as the old DOS command prompt, but much more powerful. How powerful is it? Well evidently you can write a Minecraft server in it, of course. It can do lots of other, less ludicrous things too. I use it to help get the data into shape for my Loadstar Compleat project. It is not made, to put it lightly, for things like this.
These days “bash” is sometimes used as a synonym for a range of command shells, like zsh, ksh and the like. This is a mistake of course, but to an untutored eye they all look broadly similar, and work in a similar way.
This shouldn’t be mistaken as producing a useable Minecraft server, suitable for hanging out with your friends, building blocky castles and fleeing from creepers in. As much as I can gather, it produces the bare minimum needed to connect to the game. And it cheats slightly by using awk to handle loops and some numbers. But much of the point of bash is to connect other tools together into a data flow, so I’ma allow it.
That’s it. That’s all for today. It’s 39 minutes though, so it should keep you going for a while. If you’d like to avoid Youtube and its various vagarities, you can also get it directly from the event website.
This is weird. This was around the time of the PC Engine and Mega Drive/Genesis, years after the short-lived laserdisc arcade game boom, but still within the period where some people (executives mostly) thought you could just just have a barely-interactive movie and it would rule the world. One of the attachments allowed it to play Sega CD (a.k.a. Mega CD) games, but it could also use its Mega Drive hardware to play special-made laserdisc games.
The hardware’s uniqueness, and the nature of the format, has contributed to the system’s resisting emulation. As the article tells us, laserdiscs are an analog format! So while it’s possible to copy a disc with a fidelity that would satisfy any human viewer, you couldn’t make an absolutely perfect digital copy even in theory.
The LaserActive bit is the lead-off for a substantial issue of the newsletter, which also contains news about a fan effort to translate a Cowboy Bebop game!
I’m a bit late in announcing this, but a lot’s been going on here lately, and it’s a worthy announcement, so here’s the release video for Mega Man Maker 1.10 (2 minutes). This isn’t the last time we linked to a MMM release, and its coders don’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.
A free program, it’s got the usual array of new enemies (including favorites Guts Man and Snake Man), items and music typical of MMM. A big new feature is ability capsules, which can grant new powers if found in a level, or at the creator’s option even disable them. This can let you pull off dirty tricks like making a chamber that requires the slide to enter, but that gives you a capsule that disables the slide, making it inescapable. But you wouldn’t do that, would you?
Primm made a number of high resolution images of the system cursors the Wii uses, for use as desktop cursors on Windows, macOS and Linux, and in four colors corresponding to the four player Wii remotes. You can get them here!
Nintendo has released a series of short animations starring Mario in various inoffensive, vaguely humorous situations. They average at a little less than a minute each, are nearly wordless except for Mario’s vaguely-Italian noises, and are obviously intended for children. Hey, it’s a low-effort week. Consider yourselves informed.
The first:
Number two:
Tres:
One interesting thing bout them, they’re on Nintendo UK’s YouTube channel, and I think on Nintendo of Japan’s, but they’re not on Nintendo of America’s channel. I wonder why?
Still in a low-effort mode due to upcoming events out here, but we love gaming esoterica, so here’s Hunter R’s newest video on Animal Crossing, here about the Wii version, City Folk. (14 minutes)
Highlights are details on City Folk’s letter scoring system, music in the game that can be heard but is really hard to listen to, a couple of softlock bugs, and info on how Nintendo distributed custom items via WiiConnect 24, and its unexpected relevance to The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword.
It’s a low-effort week coming up for me, but I wanted to say a few words about Kibako’s video on all the ways Blue Shells can be dodged in Mario Kart World (6½ minutes). Even through most of the words are Japanese, the idea comes across pretty well.
You may remember that Blue Shells couldn’t be dodged at all before MK8. Well if you could figure out a way to become invincible you could avoid getting clobbered and the likely loss of position, but you never get invincibility stars in first place, they only show up if you’re badly trailing, so it doesn’t often come up.
But then people found out that if you used the Super Horn item just before getting hit by a Blue Shell, it’d destroy it, and Horns can generate when you’re in the middle of the pack. And then they found out, if you used a turbo-powered Super Mushroom in a brief window before the shell hit, you could actually zip out of its explosion without getting caught in it.
But now, there’s even more ways to dodge what had, since the Mario Kart 64 days, become legendary for being the inevitable, the Grim Reaper of Mario Kart. There are now three items that make you invincible, or at least invulnerable enough to thwart the Blue Meanie. And if you’re willing to use the new rewind feature and have the presence of mind to use it, you can more generally avoid getting hit. You’ll be sent back to an earlier place on the track, but used at the right moment and for just long enough, you actually come out ahead relative to the time lost from getting pasted.
Super Horns and Mushrooms (and Mushroom’s variants, the Triple Mushroom and Golden Mushroom) can still thwart the spiny menace. But… what about zippers? What about the turbo effect from Dash Food? For the answer to that, and some other possible options, I refer you to the video.
Quick post today, here’s a 15-minute anime uploaded by Kineko Video, transcoded from a VHS tape, about the adventures of various Dragon Quest monsters. It is fun in ways that only classic anime tends to be!
