Another Youtube video? Yeah I know. This one explains how gravity works in Super Mario Galaxy. It’s 29 minutes long. The basic gist is, there are eight kinds of invisible gravity field objects, based off of simple shapes, in the game, which are used in concert to create the various orientations that Mario switches to as he moves around: Parallel, Sphere, Cube, Disk, Torus, Cylinder, Wedge, Wire (basically an arbitrary path in space), and Cone, which is only used in two places.
An interesting fact from near the end of the video: gravity affects Mario’s shadow! Shadows point towards where Mario will fall, not according to how light strikes him, to give players a sense of where he is spatially in 3D space.
It’s Sunday again! This time we have for you a seven-year-old fan-made pixel art version of the Simpsons opening. It’s gotten 27 million views since it was uploaded, but some of you must have missed it, right?
It’s loaded with jokes and in-jokes, and is so pitch-perfect that it got used on an actual episode of The Simpsons! It really needs to be paused frequently to catch every reference.
We’ve been recapping some of the talks of Roguelike Celebration 2022 for a couple of months now, and it’s probably about time to let it rest until next year. Still, there is one more talk I’d like to draw attention to, on procedural music generation.
The other talks presented this year use music generated by this system for bumper and intermission ambiance. It really became the distinctive sound for this year’s conference.
We’re continuing with our weekly presentation of talks I found interesting from Roguelike Celebration 2022! They regularly have one or two talks that go some ways outside the roguelike remit, and this year one of them was an interesting talk by Cara Hurtle about using both Telnet and Hypercard, an old multimedia system created for classic Macintosh computers, to discuss queer and trans experience. The talk itself is SWF, although following content outside the video might lead somewhere NSFW.
It’s a short talk, only about 15 minutes, and covers some interesting topics!
Dwarf Fortress has arrived on Steam, and me and blogmate Phil Nelson are so enthused! I bought it at full price nearly immediately, even though it’s $30 (there is no game in the world that’s a better value proposition for the money!) and played through the tutorial, and was pleasantly surprised that the interface learning curve is much better! The gameplay curve is just as high as it ever was, but that is all part of the game whose tagline is “Losing is fun!”
Longtime Urists will have a little adjusting to do, as some of the keypresses have been changed, some options moved around, there are no Kennels now, and it’s not obvious how to de-designate areas like tunnels to be dug. But compared to how it was before it’s an unquestionable improvement!
There’s also excellent pixel-art graphics, zoom support (hold Ctrl down while rolling the mouse wheel) and even a lot of new music! I wish there was an option to return to the ASCII-ish graphics, but with Steam support for mods I’m sure if they don’t provide it themselves, a fan will make it before long. And if you don’t have $30 rolling around in your pocket or purse, the game is still free on the official website, just as it ever was.
Polygon has not rested on this release, and immediately posted several useful articles for enthusiasts and prospective fortress chiefs, most of them written by Jeffery Parkin!
Oy. There are few lorebombs of niche gaming more intricate, and as utterly impenetrable to the uninitiated, as the Five Nights At Freddy’s superseries. What started mostly as a jumpscare delivery mechanism turned out to have backstory, and sequels, and prequels, and novels, and side games, and more.
The “Everything You Need To Know” series takes properties with sizable amounts of lore and tries to condense them to make them generally understandable. By no means do they cover all of the details, choosing to get the gist across simply rather than to explain everything that’s going on. It’s a bit humorous, but the point here isn’t a comedy and/or snarky retelling, as with the So This Is Basically series, but to give you a good rundown with some leavening humor along the way.
So, what will you do with your newfound knowledge? Impress kids? Write fanfiction? Perform exorcisms? Seek to create knockoffs?
Honestly, I could devote a post to every Roguelike Celebration talk. I’ve been limiting myself to just one such post a week, on Saturdays. This one, a short sixteen minutes talk about terrain generation, is for the developers out there.
Constraint-based generation, also known as “wave function collapse,” is a system where, as objects are placed randomly during generation, the generator “solves” the world around them, placing later terrain as is necessitated by prior terrain. If the generator reaches a contradiction, a situation where there is no viable terrain that can be placed, it undoes the contradictory placement and continues from there.
It’s a technique that’s fairly popular in procedural generation circles, and among other games is used in Caves of Qud. It’s also fun to watch it work!
It’s an unusually chill thing to play. To get a sense of the game, here is a promotional Youtube video from 2011, which looks a little different from how the game evolved, but conveys Glitch’s great sense of whimsy:
Now, there are lots of forgotten, abandoned, or failed games that are worthy of a second look, or would be if anyone knew of them. They are an invisible ocean around us, most games that have been made, by far, will disappear unknown and unloved. While many of them perhaps aren’t worth knowing about, some of them definitely are. Just because Stewart Butterfield backed this one doesn’t mean it was any good. But, some people liked it, and remember it fondly, and I’m one of them. We like old and forgotten pastimes here at Set Side B, and want to tell as many people about them as we can, as long as we are able.
Glitch was a Flash-based web MMORPG platformer. You played as a glitch, plural glitchen, a humanoid creature living in the land of Ur, which existed within the thoughts of eleven godlike Giants. (Eleven is kind of a sacred number in Glitch and Ur.)
Glitch was created in Flash, and it was already in the outs back then, preventing iOS players from entering. Since Flash is unusable in browsers any more (without alternate runtimes like Ruffle), Odd Giants is implemented in Unity, which means you can’t just jump into the game by browsing to a site, and that you have to download a 1.2 gigabyte client to play. And you’ll have to download a new one when there’s a major update. But on the other hand it means all of the game’s graphics are stored on your computer, greatly speeding load and transition times. I think I prefer to play it this way.
As I said, Glitch was created by Stewart Butterfield, the creator of Flickr and, later, Slack. (In fact, Slack’s communication code has its basis in the chat system from Glitch.) In a move atypical of many rich tech bizzes, when Glitch shut down, its production studio Tiny Speck donated nearly all of the game’s assets to the public domain, which is what makes Odd Giants, and other Glitch remake projects like Children of Ur and Eleven, legal. (Tiny Speck renamed themselves to Slack, but it’s the same company. They just make business communications software now instead of a laid back exploratory MMORPG platformer.)
Glitch, and thus its revival/remake Odd Giants, is a platformer, but it eschews many of the basic principles of platformers. There are no enemies, you never die from falling off the screen, and dangers are few. Platforming, running and jumping, is mostly just a way of getting around and collecting “quoins,” little objects floating around the games many areas. If you never lost that basic joy of running Mario around terrain without having to stomp on things or dodge hammers, you’ll have fun in Odd Giants.
Since the world of Ur is in the Giants’ thoughts you don’t actually encounter them directly as creatures in the game, but their presence is felt in many ways. Particularly, there are shrines to them all over, where you can donate objects for their favor, and eventually earn Emblems and Icons devoted to them.
The world of Ur is divided into a number of regions, each divided into a hash of streets, which are shown on the region map as lines. Here’s a map of Groddle Forest, the starting area:
Each street’s left-right scroll corresponds to its in-game area. If you’re standing at the left edge of a street in the game, you’ll also be at its left edge on the map. Where the streets connect on the map, there are signposts in the game that allow you to transfer to connecting streets. It’s not a completely frictionless way of navigating the game’s regions, but it’s easy to get used to.
If there are no enemies, then what do you do in Ur? Mostly you just run around and collect Quoins, and also water trees, harvest fruit, mine rocks, squeeze chickens, milk butterflies, nibble on piggies, and other miscellaneous activities. These actions are initiated by clicking on an object and selecting the action from a menu. When you do, a progress meter appears, which fills quickly. Most actions just take two or three seconds. As you advance, you become able to more things like make meals or transmute metals, that build off of the things you did at the start.
There is no solid final goal. It’s just a world to explore and have fun in. Without enemies to fight, some people will find this pointless. That’s okay. It was always something that some people would find unappealing. But if you like the idea of a non-violent game where you can talk with friends and do silly things in, then you may enjoy playing Odd Giants.
Aiding in this is a great sense of whimsy and fun that suffuses almost everything aspect of the play. The graphics are charming throughout, with well-animated creatures and many scenic vistas to explore. Almost every text sentence in the game has a joke or two in it. Just playing to see whatever funny thing to see or read next can be entertaining, for a little while at least. The music, especially, is worth checking the game out for a little while. I don’t think I’ve heard a single track that isn’t great.
As you do things, you use up your Glitch’s Energy. If you run out of energy, your little person “croaks” and ends up in Hell! But Hell is a region of streets, just like the others. It’s not hard to get out of Hell. You just run around squishing grapes lying on the ground. Squash enough and you’ll be returned right where you were, although without much energy. You could even spend a Get Out Of Hell Free card, if you’ve found one, and bypass that whole process. A lot of the negative things in Glitch/Odd Giants are pretty light like this. No punishment ever really feels punishing, although it may interrupt what you were doing for a bit.
In addition to Energy, glitches have Mood, which slowly depletes and decreases rewards if it dips too low, and “iMG,” or Imagination, a general advancement currency used to pay for Upgrades and other features, like expanding your house. There’s also experience points, or “XP,” which contributes to a glitch’s experience Level, but Level doesn’t affect the game much at all. It just seems to gate being able to use a few high-end items that you probably won’t even see for a while.
Instead of level, most of your character’s advancement comes from buying Upgrades and learning Skills. Some Upgrades are things like being able to walk faster and getting a triple jump, but most are things like increasing your maximum Energy, increasing the bonuses you get for Quoins, or getting bonus items randomly while doing things, or other things of that nature. Upgrades are bought with iMG, and are offered from a “deck” three at a time. You can buy any that are offered, but to get new options you’ll have to “reshuffle.” This will put the unbought upgrades back into the deck and deal you three new ones. As you buy Upgrades and remove them from play, the deck is seeded with more powerful, and much more expensive, replacements. Every game day (which last for four hours of real time) you’re allowed two free reshuffles, with them growing in price after that. There are also some other special upgrades that can be bought repeatedly, like Get Out Of Hell Free cards, extra Reshuffles, and access to special bonus areas (that, unfortunately, mostly don’t work yet in Odd Giants).
Most Upgrades are nice extras. The need to have Skills, on the other hand, blocks access to more major game features. There’s a complex array of Skills, many requiring other Skills, or particular accomplishments, under your belt before you can learn them in a kind of skill tree. Each skill takes real time to learn, which pass whether you’re in-game or not. Some skills take hours, or even days, to learn.
You start out with the capacity to know ten Skills. Back in Glitch, you could still learn skills if you were over capacity, but they took even longer. In Odd Giants, at least for now, your capacity is a hard limit, but you can raise it with Upgrades.
Some Skills are really basic things, like access to the Info command on objects, or access to the map. Most of them give you new powers, like being able to teleport places, or allow you to use items like the Meditation Orb. Many things are blocked until you learn the requisite skill, so it’s good to always make sure you have one learning, if you have excess capacity, when you log off from the game.
It cannot be denied, though, that sometimes the game feels like a gussied-up skeleton of progression systems with a visual veneer. You can make some cool items later on, like “Essence of Purple” or “No-No Powder,” but you’ll have to master many skills to get to that point. Glitch had a number of mini-games to discover that you could play at low levels by finding Game Show Tickets, and bonus levels you could buy at the Upgrade shop, but none of those things work currently. It makes the early going a bit of a slog, but the players in the game tend to be very friendly and helpful, and willing to give new players advanced items just for asking.
Details to get you started
It’s fun to collect quoins, those little floating powerup items that are scattered in many streets, but truthfully they don’t earn you much. Once in a while a quoin will give you a larger-than-usual bonus, but it’s infrequent, and rarely enough to bother going out of your way to collect them. Still, they’re fun to pick up, so I usually do it anyway.
Your Energy cap is a major limiter of your activity. Food items usually restore Energy, so it’s good to stock up on those. Learning the skill Meditation I lets you use a Meditation Orb, which allows you to regenerate a random amount of Energy or Mood when you want, with only a 30 second timeout to using it repeatedly. I would try to get that as soon as possible.
You’ll want to earn lots of iMG to unlock Upgrades and expand your yard and home. Most things you do will earn you at least a tiny bit of iMG. When you get the Skills to use machines to make stuff, you can usually convert several items at once, which can get you more for less work. A lot of your iMG will come from Achievements, which the game tracks in the background for you, and Quests, which are usually randomly assigned.
There is a bug in the current version (0.14.1), as I write this, that allows you to get all the rewards for most Quests without having to do them. Just cancel the Quest from the quest screen, then exit the game and reenter. You’ll have to wait 30 seconds before coming back in, but when you do you’ll get the full reward! One of the Quests, the one that asks you to construct an Icon, is extremely time-consuming to complete, but has high rewards. This can be used to help fund some of the most expensive Upgrades.
You can gain a lot of iMG every game day by using Emblems and Icons. There are shrines to the 11 Giants around many areas. You can click on one to donate items to it, which awards you an amount of iMG, and well as favor with that Giant, depending on the value (in the game’s money, called Currants) of the item. If you built up 1,000 points of favor with a Giant, you can exchange it for an Emblem for that Giant. (In 0.14.1, the first time you do this with each Giant you’ll receive two Emblems, which is good since you can immediately spend one to unlock an important skill!) Using an Emblem’s Contemplate command can be worth 30 iMG per Emblem of that Giant you’re holding. That takes up a lot of inventory space, so you’ll want to invest in bags, which you can buy from vendors to carry more. It takes a significant number of Currants to outfit yourself with full Bigger Bags, but it’s ultimately worth it because you can carry so many more Emblems, and all kinds of other things too.
If you collect 11 Emblems, you can combine them into an Icon, which can be set on the ground and be Reflected upon, for even more iMG. In the Groddle Heights region, at the moment, there are a number of Icons set up on the ground for people to use, although sometimes they require a small Currant payment. If you can find your way to Xalanga, the region Zealous Rd NE currently has all 11 kinds of Icons set up for easy use.
Some features are not yet coded. Some of these are in the game as Upgrades or Skills that don’t work once acquired. There is no indication which these are, which sucks, but what can I say the game’s under heavy development. One of these as of this writing are the ability to unlearn skills to make room for others, and most of the bonus levels you can buy as Upgrade cards.
At the moment lots of areas have terrain but not much of interest to find in them. Many of the special areas don’t yet work. One that does, at least, are the Savannah areas, among them Choru, Xalanga, Zhambu, Baqala, and some others. Try navigating there if you want to find a lot of valuable items quickly.
There are some other things to do if you explore a bit, but many things that were in Glitch are not yet implemented. It’s a bit wild and woolly in that regard, but presumably that kind of stuff will be implemented eventually. As it is, it’s still fun to log in, customize your character (click on their portrait in the bottom-left corner of the window), and run around and explore.
Racketboy has a great article about getting started with Dance Dance Revolution at home. DDR is still kind of going in U.S. gameplaces from the 2016 release of “Dance Dance Revolution A,” but hasn’t received a home release in that country since the days of the Wii, in 2011. That leaves options to picking up a home machine, finding a version for an older console, or, of course, yarr. Thanks, Konami! Your attention to preventing access to your products is ridiculous and easily mocked!
The ultimate decision reached is to play DDR Max or Extreme 2 on a Playstation 2, and on a CRT if at all possible, but the article contains a number of options that may be more workable for you. Dance on!
As reported earlier, Blaseball is coming back. Over the past couple of months the site has been playing host to “Fall Ball,” where players from past eras of Blaseball have been falling out of a Black Hole onto the 24 teams.
The players falling out of the Black Hole are the simulation seeding the teams for the next season. We don’t know if this is just drawing lots or if some underlying process is at work.
This is the form of the “Pre-Season” for the next era. It’ll end on December 30th, and some time after that games will resume.
Blaseball’s return won’t just be on the web, there will be iOS and Android apps!
The number on the site is the number of fans (human being persons) who have signed up to keep up with news on Blaseball’s return. As more fans sign up, more information about the season, and the weird universe of Blaseball, will be revealed. As of this writing the next reveal is slated to happen at 30,000 fans, which is some ways away with just a month to go. Even fans who had been active before should still sign up, they say. It’s kind of like a RSVP.
“Prizes” given out as the number of signups increase include special social features and commemorative pins.
The FAQ recognizes that Blaseball had gotten a bit involved at the end of the previous season (its words are that it “contains multitudes”) and the new format is meant to make it more accessible to new (and lapsed) fans.
So, what is Blaseball? It was a weird sports simulation that went viral in 2020 at the height of COVID pandemic social distancing. “Players” of Blaseball are not the humans who follow the game. Instead, they’re wholly virtual entities. In fact, games of Blaseball, for now at least, have no visual component beyond a text ticker and a diagram showing which bases are occupied.
A Blaseball season is roughly one week (or, towards the end of the previous era, two weeks). Games advance at the rate of one event every couple of seconds or so. Blaseball players possess a whimsical assortment of stats in a variety of ways, some more obvious than others, with names like “buoyancy,” “patheticism,” “Shakespearianism,” and a player’s “soulscream,” which is a string of random-like characters.
What Blaseball is, essentially, is a sport for people who don’t like sports. (Blaseball calls itself a “splort.”) Blaseball players aren’t millionaires, and won’t express odious political opinions, and Blaseball teams won’t stubbornly stick to offensive stereotypes for their team name and logo. Yet Blaseball doesn’t lack for its own form of drama. Ordinary baseball players may get injured, but Blaseball players can be outright incinerated by rogue empires during solar eclipses. And, while fans (Blaseball’s name for human participants like me and, perhaps, you) cannot directly affect games, they can indirectly influence outcomes by voting on advantages for their teams, and can bet fake money (but not paid-for perks or NFTs!) on outcomes.
Blaseball developed a huge and absurd fandom during its early months which, truthfully, it seems to have been trying to recapture in the time since. There is a website player statistics, blaseball-reference.com. There’s both an unofficial and official channel giving seasonal recaps. There’s even an internet-famous band, the Seattle Garages, named after the Blaseball team, and songs like Mike Townsand Is A Disappointment.
Blaseball may never again become as popular as it was during quarantine times, but it is a unique internet thing and I personally eagerly await its return.
That official YouTube channel is pretty humorous, by the way, and you might be interested in a couple of videos from it. Here’s one recapping its earliest seasons:
All of those videos are very entertaining! And quite confusing!
This is a real rarity. Saturday Supercade has, to my knowledge, never been officially released on any media format. All of the tapes of this show date back to their original broadcasts in 1983-5. I’m sorry for the poor quality, but this is from a tape almost certainly recorded off of live television nearly 40 years ago.
The year 1983 was such a weird time in media history. Take for instance the movie Joysticks. A cheaply-made culture cash-in, essentially the Supervan of its decade, it was a teen sex comedy themed around arcades, and it could only have been released in 1983. In 1982 games were big, but it takes time for a movie to be made. In 1984, US arcades and consoles had crashed calamitously, and any projects in production would have been cancelled. Saturday Supercade also dates from 1983.
Saturday Supercade was a Saturday morning cartoon show that hosted a variety of different game characters and universes. By no means a classic of animation, there’s still a lot of interesting things about it. Donkey Kong gives Mario and Pauline their modern names (decided on around the time of Donkey Kong Jr’s arcade release), and Donkey Kong is voiced by legendary early TV children’s entertainer Soupy Sales.
Frogger is depicted by the show as a reporter for a swamp’s newspaper. Q*Bert is a student in a 50s-styled high school, and other characters (including a girl Q*Bert, “Q*Tee,” not seen in the game) are imagined as his friends and rivals. Donkey Kong Jr has the young ape searching for his father, while assisted by a greaser. Pitfall’s cartoon is not only the sole home-original game to be featured on the show, but also lent two of its characters, Pitfall Harry’s niece Rhonda and mountain lion pet Quickclaw, to cameo roles in the game’s sequel Pitfall II: Lost Caverns. Kangaroo and Space Ace were introduced in the show’s second season. Yes, somehow, it got a second season.
The Wikipedia page of the show notes that episodes of Space Ace were once shown late at night on Cartoon Network, and once in a while can be spotted between shows on Boomerang, while “The Best of Q*Bert” is available as a print-on-demand DVD from Amazon. Other than that, many episodes are lost outside of master reels held by whatever company owns Ruby-Spears’ output these days, which I expect is Warner Media. There’s tons of Saturday Morning shows that are lost; this one only survives to us in any form because classic video games have oddly persisted in this weird cultural cul-de-sac, the same one that made Wreck-It-Ralph an improbably hit for Disney.
So please, enjoy, or else, experience whatever substitute for enjoyment you can bring yourself to feel while watching an old old kids cartoon from the classic arcade era. Queasiness? Unease? Existential dread?
