Set Side B

Impending Zelda

As you read this, Tears of the Kingdom, the ludicrously anticipated latest sequel to The Legend of Zelda and direct followup to the most popular Zelda game ever made, Breath of the Wild, is just being released. Yes, I pre-ordered my copy.

I say Breath of the Wild is the most popular Zelda because of sales figures. At over 29 million sales it far outstrips the previous best-selling Zelda, Ocarina of Time, at 14 million. The third best-selling is actually Link’s Awakening, but only because of the Switch remake. The original Legend of Zelda is down in 7th place.

Given that the game was leaked early and hackers are already combing through it and seeking to repurpose its assets for their own use (and godspeed to them in their efforts), I thought we might do a link (heh) roundup of a category of Zelda fanwork that would be impossible without their efforts: randomizers!

Zelda Randomizer and Zelda II Randomizer were two of the earliest randomizers to achieve high popularity, and they’re still probably my favorites. Zelda II Randomizer will even remake the overworld, a scrambling of the original game that few randomizers will dare try. Infinite Hyrule will redesign the overworld of the original game, and it’s compatible with the main Zelda Randomizer so you can remake that version as well. (I’ve linked to ZR and IH in the past.) Together, they’re as a long-time NES fan can get to the experience of playing the original game, before all of the secrets were discovered.

There’s two especially notable Link to the Past Randomizers, both implemented as web applications. A standard one, and a really fancy one that combines it with Super Metroid into one glorious trainwreck of a game.

There are also randomizers for Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask (especially interesting given that game’s unusual structure), a version that combines both Ocarina and Majora into a single game and randomizes their fusion, a couple for Link’s Awakening, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, and for both the Switch and Wii U versions of Breath of the Wild.

There, that oughta hold you for long enough for me to play a bit of TotK. See you tomorrow! Probably.

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Someone Runs Mac OS 9 on a Nintendo Wii

The narrator has a moderate case of Youtuberitis (symptoms evident: over-gesturing with hands, annoying shtick; absent: ending sentences in an undertone like they were John Cleese playing a TV presenter), but it’s still an interesting and even informative video about making software, and hardware, doing things they really weren’t designed to do.

One piece of the puzzle for getting this insane project working was Linux on Wii; another piece was the fact that the Wii and late versions of Mac OS Classic both use PowerPC processors. It doesn’t work perfectly, but as they say, it’s amazing that the Nintendog talks at all.

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Ginormo Sword

This one’s coming to you from some years back. Ginormo Sword, by Babarageo back in 2008, a Flash game that’s playable once again via Ruffle. It is one of a small, but gratifying, genre of games where you start small and just get bigger and bigger and bigger, and part of the fun is just seeing to what extremes the game supports you going.

Games like Dungeons & Dragons pay at least lip service to realism, less so now than its origins, but it’s still there. There are limits, both theoretical and practical, to how far characters can gain levels, can gain statistics, can gain hit points, and that makes sense. For even Superman, when it comes right down to it, is still a roughly humanoid creature of a bit over six feet in height. If he were in the same comic universe as Galactus, it would defy credibility if this vast being were stopped by what to it was an amoeba.

Ginormo Sword is what you get if you peel back these limits, and basically say, if you can earn the cash for it? You can do it. There are limits, but the game goes to ridiculous extremesbefore you run into them. It’s basically an “incremental game,” like a clicker, but in a different format. See for yourself.

Ginormo Sword (browser playable, $0)

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Pico-8 Moon Patrol

The Pico-8 is the most popular fantasy game console by a wide margin. We’ve already linked to Josh “cortex” Millard’s Ennuigi, which is notable enough to have its own Wikipedia entry.

Ennuigi was more of an extended joke than a game, though, while Pico-8 Moon Patrol is no joke; it’s substantially harder than the original arcade game, putting you up against harder obstacles earlier. Sometimes it doesn’t feel fair when a flying saucer drops a bomb at such an angle that neither speeding up nor slowing down could have avoided it in time, although it’s possible, in this version, to shoot down the bomb before it strikes you.

Give it a try! This video is my best run to date, getting through the first three sectors:

pahammond’s Moon Patrol for Pico-8 (lexoffle.com)

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Make Random Items Appear Where You Want In Animal Crossing New Horizons

It’s three years after the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, famously introduced to a human contact-starved world right when efforts to contain Pandemic 2020 were at their height, unlike now when the world has largely decided to let the immuno-compromised fend for themselves. This isn’t the place to say what I think about that, but it is the place to write something that, had it been known in 2020, might have helped people out a lot.

The following is paraphrased from my Mastodon thread on the matter.

Every day, the game hides up to 10 100-bell coins, 5 wasps nests, and 2 random furniture items in trees on your island.

If you care about finding any of these things, there is a way to make the game put them where you want them. Selling wasps and items made from nests can bring in about 10,000 bells a day. The furniture can be given to villagers to help increase friendship. The coins aren’t worth much, admittedly.

Doing this, you can easily get the items you want each day without searching among all your trees. I use it to get the two random furniture pieces each day.

To make this trick work, you must have _exactly 17 non-fruit trees on your island_, enough to generate all the randomly-placed tree items. They can be cedar or other, plain trees.

If you don’t discover one of these items on a day, it’ll be left there for following days. It only places new items if the old ones haven’t been discovered, up to the maximum of each type. The trick relies on this fact.

Decide which of the categories of items you want to lock down the location of. Starting from that location, shake each tree until you find one of the objects you care about. In the example images I use furniture (the leaf icons), since those are a type of item it’s useful to search for quickly. You’ll probably want to have a net on hand, and maybe some Medicine, in the likely event you find one or more wasps’ nests.

Once you found the kind of item you want, stop shaking trees for that day. On the next day, all of the items you discovered will be found among the trees you shook that day, just in different places. Now, shake only the tree you want the item to appear in. If it’s not the item, keep shaking the trees you had shaken before until you find it. With luck, you’ll find it before you shake them all. Now stop shaking trees again.

Doing this day after day, you can get the item narrowed down until it appears where you want it to be generated. Once it appears there, stop shaking for that day, and then don’t shake it again on following days. Start over with another of the type of item you want to narrow down.

By working like this, probably within a couple of weeks you can get all the items you want generating where you want them. So long as you don’t shake any other trees, those will always produce the ones you want. If you shake other random trees, you’ll introduce uncertainty into what’s generated.

In this way, I have produced two trees that always produce furniture every day, generally without fail. This trick has been tested for months on my island.

The only drawback that I can find is, a couple of seasonal events (Christmas and Easter) are known to disrupt it, since they can repurpose some of your trees as non-random types for a little while. When the event ends, you’ll probably have to set it up again.

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Dall-E Sucks At Drawing Most Classic Video Game Characters

I had originally scheduled a post on this for a couple of weeks ago, but WordPress gained what I will euphemistically call a personality at that time, and the post developed a “critical error” whenever I tried to edit or view it. I kept pushing it back in the hopes of being able to figure out what was the trouble, but the trouble refused to be be figured out. So eventually I just remade the post.

Whether it’s intentional or not, if you ask Dall-E to depict a number of classic video game characters or elements, it’ll show itself to be surprisingly clueless. Here’s what I got from it:

“Mario” here is pretty good. His cultural ubiquity is inescapable.

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Final Fantasy Artist Yoshitaka Amano Draws Cuphead Characters

I’ve been trying lately to take it easy on the Youtube posts, but in this age of the internet they seem unavoidable. This one though, I think is unquestionably worth it, a six-minute video of the illustrator of classic Final Fantasy games (whose work mostly came through in monster images and manual art) doing a piece for the cover of the CD soundtrack in preparation for Cuphead’s Japanese release. The early moments of the video are preliminary sketches that show them getting used to the characters; the work he settles on is a Final Fantasy-esque interpretation of Cuphead and friends (and enemy). Thanks to NoxAeternum to finding this and posting it to Metafilter!

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Pac-Pac

From 2016 comes Pac-Pac, a Pac-Man style arcade game for an unusual platform: the Commodore Plus/4!

The Commodore 64 was famously intended to be a family computer that could also play games. The Plus/4 was intended as more of a business machine, without hardware sprites or the 64’s capable sound chip. It still had 64K of RAM though, and some productivity software included built-into the system in ROM. It could also output more colors than the C64, was clocked at a higher speed, and had a simpler design with fewer chips.

Still though, the lack of hardware sprites was a big limiter for games, which remained a driving factor for microcomputer adoption. Having no sprites, in Pac-Pac, the player’s surrogate character and the ghosts are both drawn on-screen in software, which consumes a lot of processor time. The game still runs at a decent rate though, and is fairly fun to play.

It’s best not to play Pac-Pac like Pac-Man. Despite a superficial resemblance it’s much the different game. The ghosts don’t have different personalities, and don’t coast confidently through the maze, but jitter about uncertainly, and randomly. This makes them generally easier to avoid, but it also means they’re prone to camping in the vicinity of uneaten dots. You’ll find you’ll have to lure them away from the last dots in the maze to get to them safely. You’re more likely to lose a Pac from daring their presence a little too closely.

Unlike Pac-Man there are no energizers, so there’s no way to attack the monsters yourself. On later boards the ghosts slowly get more aggressive, and they move faster. There’s also a timer to force you to go after dots. Eating randomly-appearing fruit replenishes the timer by a bit. There are also Question Mark items that appear in the maze, that can produce good or bad effects. They’re usually good though. The only ways to earn extra lives are by earning 5,000 hard-won points or, occasionally, from a Question Mark.

To play it you’ll probably need an emulator, such as the one from WinVICE. RetroArch can play it with its xplus4 core, which comes from the VICE project.

I am informed that the author of Pac-Pac, Skoro, passed away earlier this year. He made a plethora of work for the Plus/4, as shown by his page on Commodore Plus/4 World, from 2019 to all the way back in 1988. 31 years is a good long while, and I hope that the fruits of his labor will be enjoyed for decades to come.

Pac-Pac, from Commodore Plus/4 World

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The Battle Vortex Audio Show

Ultima Online is a wonder. World of Warcraft debuted in 2004; Ultima Online started in 1997. And it’s still going!

When it was new podcasts were not yet a thing! Podcasts arose from the fusion of periodic MP3 audio content and RSS feeds, in October 2000. Yet when UO was new there was an audio show called Battle Vortex that covered it. So we can’t call it an Ultima Online podcast, because those didn’t exist then, but it was a whole lot like one.

Battle Vortex had been gone from the internet for awhile, but now the whole show, 156 episodes, has been uploaded to the Internet Archive! It is a priceless snapshot of the early days of MMORPGs, and it’s heartening to see it housed someplace that will preserve it.

Battle Vortex (Internet Archive)

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Italian Pop Culture References in Vampire Survivors

Image from article, ultimately from someone named poncle

Damiano Gerli at waynow Gaming explores the plethora of Italian internet and popular culture references in Vampire Survivors, including singers, anime, food and dairy brands, and a couple of earthier references, including one that could be taken as a name for someone unafraid to break wind as much as possible.

Vampire Survivors: Exploring its Trove of Italian Cultural References

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Why Speedruns And Not Score Attacks?

This editorial doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of this blog. However, blogs don’t have views anyway, so what would that even mean?

Here is a question you might not of thought of. Speedruns are, after some years, still very popular, streamers still chase records, sometimes a matter of shaving off tenths of a second off of the previous time, and AGDQ and SGDQ continue to bring in millions for charities.

But, why? Why is it speedruns that have gained the interest of so many runners and spectators? Many games have their own method of measuring player skill: points! The score record chase is even much older than speedrunning, dating back to the heyday of Twin Galaxies. It’s even encouraged on the attract-mode vanity boards of countless arcade machines. So why is it that quick-playing has attracted so much attention, and not high-scoring?

The first thing, of course, is that time attacks (playing to finish quickly) is universally applicable, while not all games track score. Score keeping has become a lot less common in recent decades. What does it even mean to score attack Metroid Prime or Resident Evil IV? And often a quick-playing game is a lot more exciting to watch than one where the player just seeks to increase some abstract value. Fast play is easy to understand, but high point awards are often not immediately accessible to a viewer who isn’t already familiar with the game’s systems.

But more than that, many games have very sloppy point discipline. If a game doesn’t have a timer, but does have a score and respawning enemies, then there is no reason, from a point maximizing standpoint, to not just regenerate the same enemy over and over, a boring way to play but still, by the strict rules of the game, valid. To some extent this can be accounted for through out-of-game rules, like how Twin Galaxies will disallow certain types of play that just seek to increase points in an empty manner.

It’s not always easy to decide what counts as actually playing the game and what’s meaningless farming, which makes the allowance of some types of play a judgement call, and any time an official’s subjective opinion becomes an important part of the legality of some behavior, you’re going to end up with people trying to push the boundary of what is allowable, and as we see from professional sports, that means no end of arguing about whether a referee or umpire’s call is valid or not.

This doesn’t even cover scoring randomness. Ms. Pac-Man is a great game in many ways, but one aspect of it that makes it less suitable for score attacks is that, in long games, the point values of fruit becomes such a huge part of the score. After the seventh board, the fruit generated in Ms. Pac-Man are random, and can be worth anywhere from 100 points for Cherries, to 5,000 points for a Banana. Up to two of these can appear on each board, and once the game progresses past the point where ghosts can be eaten for points, the value for the higher-valued fruit easily overwhelms all the other scoring in the game, up to the kill screen at around board 144. (Ms. Pac-Man doesn’t have a definite kill screen like Pac-Man does, but a variety of possible screens.)

When point awards are random like this, getting a score record in an individual game becomes a matter of luck. What that practically means is, players who attempt more runs are more likely to get a lucky game that gets a record. Essentially, record chasers must utilize the law of averages: a person who plays 100 games is much more likely to get a lot of Bananas in a single game among all of them than a person who has only played ten.

But even so? Lots of games were made explicitly with scores in mind. After decades where it was a common, sometimes even primary mode of play, I feel like playing for points is fairly neglected now. I mean, I’m not going to go on a rant about young folks trying to get their games over with without stopping to savor them. Just, you know, it’s not bad to play for points.

I fully realize that this is a topic that no one cares about, and even I am not really that concerned with it. It’s just an arbitrary value to maximize. “Yay, I’m X good! I’m Y better than I was before!” Yeah not really terribly important.

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What’s Yahtzee Up To?

Yahtzee is Ben Croshaw, the guy who has been making The Escapist’s Zero Punctuation for going on 16 years now. He’s the last vestive of the version of The Escapist before they went in on Gamergate, which it seems like he managed to weather by staying in his lane. While his videos aren’t the pass-around fodder that they used to, it’s kind of comforting sometimes that he’s still around, offering his highly opinionated and profane takes on video game-related things.

Croshaw’s videos cover a very mainstream-populist, triple-A beat that does not often intersect with ours, and frankly often puts me at odds with his opinions. But once in a while he covers a topic that sort of intersects with one of our remits or Retro, Indie or Niche. That’s what we present here today: three times in recent memory that he covered something we generally care about.

Metroid Prime Remastered (generally dismissive)

Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope (unexpectedly positive)

Sonic Frontiers (says there’s a couple of good ideas that it then ruined)

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