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!
I’ve heard it said that there are several different varieties of Nintendo Directs. There the Major Announcement type (Switch 2!), the Bunch of Games type (Indie World!), the Franchise Update type (what’s Pikachu up to next?) and then there’s the type that introduces an individual game. (Breath of the Wild!) This video is of that last kind, but the game it announces is not the usual kind of thing.
Why did he leave? I can’t say with any accuracy, I have no sources at Nintendo, but I do sometimes remember little things I’ve read, which may or may not be true. One of those things was that he had left under a cloud due to the perceived failure of Kirby Air Ride, which had a long and troubled development process, starting on N64 then moving to Gamecube, and not having a lot of traditional content compared to its sibling Mario Kart. But this could be false: I believe he’s said publicly it had to do with not wanting to make the same kind of game over and over. So now, let’s set this thread down, and come back to it in a few paragraphs.
Sakurai worked as an independent game designer for a while, enviable work if you can get it, and are as good at it as he is. The first game he made out of the gate was early Nintendo DS hit Meteos, a fine game that everyone should play, if they can find it now.
Meteos was an action-puzzle game that did genuinely new things in that genre, and was really good, a tricky combination. He then founded his own company Sora Ltd., which has maintained close ties with Nintendo: every game they’ve made since has been published by Nintendo. One of those was Kid Icarus: Uprising, another fondly-remembered title. And then….
Yeah, I’m getting to it. Sakurai has continued to direct every Super Smash Bros. title. It’s been said that Nintendo believes no one else can effectively make a Smash Bros. game. Super Smash Bros. Melee came out before Sakurai left HAL and was a gigantic hit; the Gamecube wasn’t exactly a stellar success, but imagine how it’d have fared if Melee hadn’t been made? People still play Melee in large numbers today; ask AsumSaus about it.
While some subsequent entries have not met with perfect acclaim (Brawl), every installment has still sold an awful lot of copies. Nintendo keeps asking Sakurai to make the next Smash Bros., and although he’s mention feeling tired and worn out (he heads gigantic teams to make them, and it’s an immense amount of work), even threatening to retire at one point, Nintendo seems to keep finding bigger dump trucks of money to leave at his houses. So as an independent agent he’s made the huge Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and the colossal Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Super Smash Bros. for 3DS, and the utterly gigantic Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the fighting game that contains Mario, Link, Samus, Fox, Ness, Ryu, Simon Belmont, fighting Mii characters, Cloud, Sora and freaking Steve from Minecraft, among with dozens and dozens of others, even more if you count the Mii costumes you can buy, including Shantae, Cuphead and extra-freaking Sans Undertale himself.
And now, to pick back up that thread I left back there on the ground.
A few months ago at the Major Announcement Nintendo Direct about the release of the Switch 2, there was a short section announcing a sequel what may have been the game that caused Sakurai to leave Nintendo: Kirby Air Ride.
Sakurai has been vindicated many times over since then. Does it not have much content? He’s make the Smash Bros. games, each a greater tribute to the concept of excess than the last.. He said he didn’t want to make the same game repeatedly, but there’s been six Smash Bros. titles now. And after all this time, KAR’s City Trial still has a surprisingly large and involved fanbase, and even a tournament scene.
Early in the new announcement video (below), Sakurai mentions that it was bosses at Nintendo and HAL that asked him to make a new Kirby Air Ride game, not the other way around. It had to have been quite the vindication for him. Here is that video (47 minutes); for discussion of its contents, see below.
It has the slightly confusing name, when mentioned alongside the original, of Kirby Air Riders. I’ll abbreviate it KARrs.
Where KAR basically only had Kirby as a character, with King Dedede and Meta Knight more as gimmick characters, KARrs is full of characters, including former villains (Dedede and Meta Knight of course, and newbies Magalor and Susie), allies (Gooey and Bandana Waddle Dee), enemies (Chef Kawasaki, Knuckle Joe, Cappy, Starman and Waddle Doo), and various Kirby colors too. It has most (if not all) of the vehicles, called “machines,” from the first game and a few more. And it supports up to 8 players, 16 when played online.
And it still has City Trial, which Sakurai accurately refers to as the main event. Air Ride mode is a good basis, but City Trial is why people still obsessively play KAR today. It has a new City, on a floating island in the sky, and named “Skyah” He said there’s only one map, which seems a shame. KAR only had one City Trial map too. Skyah looks more varied, but not much more varied.
The core of City Trial is the same: the search for vehicles, the collection of vehicle-upgrading patches, the player-vs-player combat, and the sometimes-faulty information on which Stadium you’re trying to optimize for. KAR is a game where you can be told prepare for a race, and 10% of the time it won’t be a race. “Mind games,” as Sakurai calls it.
There’s still random events, but now there can be random contests that take place in the time-limited City portion of the match. All the players who choose to participate join in a special minigame that can award extra powerups, but players can also choose to ignore all that noise entirely, and just keep exploring and collecting patches on their own.
What’s missing? Sakurai says at the end that there’s lots of things he didn’t have time to mention, but they might just be gone completely. One of them, Top Ride, isn’t likely to be missed; it was a single-screen racing mode kind of like Atari’s Sprint games. KAR’s Air Ride’s tracks often made appearances as City Trial’s match-determining Stadiums, but Top Ride played no part in it. It’s probably been binned.
Another thing missing is KAR’s Checklist feature, a grid of squares for each of the three game modes, and each space representing a single challenge. Clearing the grid offered meta-progression in a game that made absolutely no attempt at storytelling. The Checklist was one of KAR’s big unique ideas, and it migrated over to a couple of titles in the Smash Bros. series. It’d be a shame if it was entirely gone from the game that birthed it. But Sakurai is known to discard even prominent features if he’s bored with them; remember the “Special Bonuses” in the first two Smash Bros. games, and how they vanished starting with Brawl? Remember how its Trophies didn’t make it into Smash Ultimate?
Even without the Checklists, there’s so much in the video to be excited about. This is unquestionably the Switch 2 game I’m most excited about. It’s true, it’s a sequel to a game that Masahiro Sakurai has made before, but it’s also an opportunity to iterate on ideas that deserve to be given another chance. Kirby Air Ride was something unique, and how often do we see that these days? Kirby Air Riders may be that utter rarity here in the 53rd year of video gaming: the birth of a new genre. It’s a personal pleasure to witness.
It’s been a while since I linked a good solid ultra-geeky hacking video. Poking Technology is really good at this sort of thing. Here he takes apart one of those extremely cheap portable game consoles (1 hour 12 minutes), the kind you might find at the checkout line at Walmart for ten bucks, put logic analyzers on it, run it through Ghidra, and basically figure out how it works.
I find this stuff fascinating. Look, I’m not going to claim everyone will be interested in it, but that’s one of the advantages of running a daily blog that casts a super wide net, if you’re not interested in this there’ll probably be something more to your liking tomorrow. And if this is your kind of thing, take it from me, it’s really going to be your kind of thing. I’ve been munching on this video a few minutes at a time, and I’m still not at the end of it yet, I don’t know where this leads. I hope it goes somewhere where he puts his own code on it, which I kind of suspect he might.
CP/M fascinates me. It was the first real crossplatform OS for microcomputers, and it was also extremely small. It could be implemented in as few as 5KB of memory, and those 5,120 bytes got you a character-based screen, disk access, a file system and I/O support. If it looks like DOS to you, it’s because it was originally created as a clone of CP/M, and so lots of CP/M’s limitations transferred over to DOS, like its single-letter drive names and its 8.3 filename structure. But CP/M was first released in 1974! It was silly for Microsoft to have adapted that limitation too, and as a result until Windows 95 their consumer OSes had to live with the same limitation, when even Commodore 64s could have 16-character filenames. Jeez! PC-DOS/MS-DOS would soon get directory support, which CP/M didn’t get until the under-adopted version 3; until then it had to use a less-flexible system where a disk could be split up into numbered “user areas.”
CP/M being so small, it was also very simple, enough that one person could understand everything going on under the hood, something you really can’t say about OSes these days. That complexity has been used, in recent times, in service of their makers against their customers, to push in all kinds of misfeatures that many people would rather not have.
Nowadays CP/M is a footnote, its founding company Digital Research is a mere bag of property rights owned by Lineo, while Microsoft is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and it’s very much because of a single decision by people at IBM to go with PC-DOS, later MS-DOS, from Microsoft. IBM offered both OSes, but they sold CP/M for 8086 for $240, several times what they sold PC-DOS for, and that’s why Windows is huge today and CP/M is a footnote. But there is no reason to believe definitely that, if the decision had gone the other way, that we wouldn’t be bemoaning Digital Research’s terrible decisions now instead of Microsoft’s.
But it’s also the case that DR might have turned out differently, while we know Microsoft would become the uncaring behemoth that harmed people’s perceptions of computing since the 80s, and is now propping up OpenAI and trying to shove it into everything. Remember everyone, to always strive to be better than your hypothetical replacement, or someone on a random blog decades in the future might ask aloud if we’d be better off without you.
Yesterday’s was the appetizer; this one’s the main course. It’s from Choa again, and it’s 40 obscure facts about Sonic Adventure 2 (18 minutes). The Chao get mention in it too, don’t worry, but it’s mostly about the maxi-game, not the mini-game.
There’s some very interesting facts in there, like how the game seems like it was intended to be set in San Francisco, that getting to the end of a stage with every ring in it gives you an automatic A rank, or that you can summon Big the Cat in cutscenes by tapping the A button!
The Sonic Adventure games are artifacts of their time. Sega kept making games in their style, like Sonic Heroes for instance, or the Wii Sonic games, but they never really seemed to be headliners after the Dreamcast days.
I think now we can generally agree they’re failed experiments. There was a certain jankiness to them. You never knew if the camera was going to suddenly glitch out, and either leave you unable to see where you are, or change the control context and send the snarky rodent thingy hurling off the land to his doom, shouting “No!” as he fell. Or you might fall through a floor, or move through a wall, or whatever. The exploration-based treasure hunting stages with Knuckles or Rouge (in her first game), or the mech combat stages with Tails or Dr. Eggman (playable!) tended to glitch out less often, but it could still happen.
Despite the obvious effort put into it, it always felt like it had been rushed through without much playtesting. As I watched Choa’s video myself, a lot of memories, many of them bad, sublimated out from the depths of my brain. But I still feel a lot of fondess for the games, the jank included. They weren’t like anything else out there, and there still hasn’t been much else like them since.
One of the facts mentions a Green Hill stage. Even people who played Sonic Adventure 2 back then might not know about it. To unlock it, you had to earn every blessed emblem in the game, all 180 of them. Any objective there was to do in SA2, you had to do it. Some came from completing stages, but for some you had to get A ranks. Some of them involved having Chao win at sports. You had to get all of them in order to play a special level inspired by the iconic Green Hill Zone from Sonic 1. It was a ton of work for that nostalgia bomb, and yes, I ended up doing all of that to see it. It was okay.
My favorite fact about SA2, not covered in the video, is that the lass bosses were called the Biolizard, and then its upgraded version, the Finalhazard. Oh the questions! Why was it the Biolizard, all lizards are biological as part of their essential lizardness, did Gerald Robotnik invent other kinds of lizards? Why did it upgrade into something with the incredibly generic name Finalhazard? If had just been called the Finallizard, that’d have been silly oh yes, but actually would have made more sense.
And what else did Gerald get up to, up there on the Space Station Ark, trying to create the Ultimate Lifeform? “Behold my latest creation: the EVILWALRUS! No no wait better, the MUTANTOTTER! Oh I know, how about the POWERCHICKEN! Nah I’m fooling, the Ultimate Lifeform is really this hedgehog person over here. I know, he seems moody. Please humor him, he’s going through an emo phase. It might cheer him up if you listened to his poetry.”
The Chao Garden seems like such an odd inclusion in the Sonic Adventure games now. In fact, they seemed like an odd inclusion back then too, about 25 years ago.
It was created as the successor to the “A-Life” aspect of the Nightopians in NiGHTS into Dreams, itself not really a huge part of that game, but it encouraged repeat play to see what they would evolve into. The Chao Garden, for those unfamiliar, was a virtual pet sim included as a side game. Animals rescued in the levels of the main game could be collected, then brought to a number of small areas where they could be presented to one of a number of little blue creatures, the Chao, that they could raise and modify. The Chao didn’t eat the creatures, they instead kind of nuzzled them. Personally, I think they should have eaten them; it makes more thematic sense than whatever magical sparkly thing was going on.
Giving animals to Chao increased their stats, and could even give them new skills. Sonic and friends could then have them participate in various contests, load them up into a mini game on the Dreamcast’s “VMU” memory card, or “bred” with other Chao.
The original platform of the Sonic Adventure games was the Dreamcast, and while the Sonic Adventure servers were running, you could upload them to a babysitting service (or so I seem to remember), or visit the “black market” to obtain various items of benefit to your Chao. It was a really detailed and thought-out pointless minigame, and it came to be identified with the Sonic Adventure games, following the games of the series as it was ported to other, less-doomed platforms.
Choa’s video has more information than a non-fanatic could ever hope to fully understand, but it’s interesting to hear about. These kinds of virtual pet games aren’t made too often, and even less as part of headliners like the Sonic Adventure games were.
Read the subject line, and say to yourself quietly, “No way. What’s the catch?”
There is a catch, of course. There is an art to these kinds of hacks though, and it lies in finding the right catch. The catch that makes the hack possible at all, but seems the least like a cheat.
You can technically “run” Doom on a C64, if you actually run it on a Raspberry Pi plugged into it, that only uses the machine’s video hardware for output. That’s an egregious cheat; Raspberry Pis didn’t exist back in 1983 when the C64 was new.
There are speed-up cartridges for the C64, and you could even implement a co-processor to do much of the hard work of rendering the display for you. That’s also a cheat, although a bit less of one.
One could approach the problem from the other direction, diminishing the scope of the hack until it fits more comfortably in the computer’s capabilities. There are 3D corridor games on the C64; when I was a kid, a tape of software that a co-worker gave to my dad had one, called LABYRINTH, that was written in BASIC. But if it was truly the equal of Wolfenstein 3D it’d have revolutionized the gaming world. It wasn’t, and it didn’t. It generated one of those Wizardry-style mazes, sometimes called “blobbers,” where your perspective is fixed in the center of a grid-based maze. It wasn’t a shooter, it didn’t animate smoothly, and it was a pretty simple algorithm, simple enough that lots of games used it, especially RPGs.
What makes smoothly rendered graphics slow on a C64, indeed on pretty much all home computers at the time? It’s the necessity of using a bitmapped graphics mode. The math of deciding where the corridor vertices and lines go is within the machine’s capability, even at 1 mHz, but writing all those bytes into the C64’s 8K bitmap screen takes a huge amount of time.
It’s why few action games on the Commie used the bitmapped modes. Even if you used a hand-tuned machine code loop to write a single value to every byte in the bitmap, it’d be slow enough that you could visibly watch the screen fill up. If you wanted to actually vary those bytes, such as by rendering walls, it’d take much longer. Even filling the text screen takes so long that it’s difficult to do it in a single video frame, which is why games that feature NES-style full-screen scrolling on the C64 are impressive. (There are tricks to doing it; some of them quite bizarre. Let’s discuss those some other time.)
But you could do what jimo9757 did, and use text characters to simulate the rendering. In fact they did it one better, and used the PETSCII graphics characters for the display. The result is pretty striking! See for yourself in this demo (8 minutes):
Reserving a port of the screen for a status display is itself a bit of a cheat, that cuts down on the number of bytes that must be changed for each screen update, but it’s one that Wolfenstein 3D used too so let’s give it a pass. The walls only have horizontal lines for textures, but it’s not like the original’s were that worthy either. It’s certainly not 60 fps, it’s maybe 15 or 12, but it’s certainly still impressive to see those walls glide by smoothly on a machine with a 1 mHz 6502-class chip.
Since the game uses PETSCII for the maze, this engine can even work on the Commodore’s first home computer, the PET, whose character set was fixed in unchangeable mask ROM. Here’s video of the first-person shooter they made for the PET (3 minutes). I think the graphics, while many would call them primitive, have a fun style to them:
It is as the title says. It’s been discovered that, in the original Animal Crossing on Gamecube, if you read the village Message Board 43 times, it’ll reset your axe’s durability. But there are more consequences than just that! It’s explained in HunterR’s 10-minute video.
So, why does this happen? The precise details are in the video, but here’s a summary.
When you’re holding an axe, the game is not discriminating about which A button presses cause it to degrade—or, rather, its damage value will increase. If you hit objects other than trees, it’ll pick up three times as many damage points. But you can do other things that use the A button, and if an axe is in hand, its also take on damage.
There are actually eight different axe objects, that are switched between when eight points of damage is taken. (The more damaged versions have slightly different appearances.) The damage counter isn’t actually tied to the axe: it’s a separate count that’s counts for all axes. (Meaning, if you have multiple axes and try to spread out the wear between them, technically only the axe that you’re holding when you take the eighth damage point really gets harmed.) The value is also not saved when you save the game; if you hit trees seven times with an axe, then save and reload, the wear will be forgotten.
If you do something with the A button while the axe is in hand, but it doesn’t strike an object that might cause it to break, it’ll keep gaining damage. If you’re facing an object that isn’t a tree, like the Message Board sign, it’ll even gain three as much. But the check that switches to the next-most-damaged axe type only happens when the axe actually hits something. (It also happens if you open doors with an axe in hand!)
The counter to check if the axe should take wear is a single byte interpreted as a signed value, so, if you can get it to 128 or higher, the high bit is set, so the C library code used for the game’s comparisons will consider it to be a negative number. 43 x 3 is 129, or -126. You can then keep using the axe over and over until the number turns positive again, at 0, or until you save the game and reset the counter anyway.
By the way, to bring this to the realm of things I have personal knowledge of… Animal Crossing New Horizons doesn’t have a similar bug (as far as I know at least), but there is a different unexpected aspect of its tool-breaking. If a timer is running, like from hitting a rock for Bells or from participating in a round of a fishing or bug-catching tournament, tools won’t break until the timer expires, even if they exceed their durability limit. It’ll count the damage, but it won’t actually break the tool until the timer runs out. If you don’t use the tool in a way that might cause it to break, then it won’t, not until you next use it. If you’ve kept track of how much wear it’s taken, you can then sell it at Nooks and get some of the value for it.
Finding this one was a real treat for me. I’m so pleased that there are still people who care deeply about these weird arcade/console hack & slash games from a twice-defunct publisher. While in its final years it got renamed to “Midway Games West,” it’ll always be Atari Games in my mind, and that’s what it rightfully should be called, it having had a direct lineage to the first successful arcade video game manufacturer of all.
Gauntlet Dark Legacy is the last of the “real” Gauntlet games (it’s best not to talk about Seven Sorrows), and is especially notable to have received something of a redesign when it came out on consoles. I don’t think the changes were all for the better; the make work of collecting crystals and stuff does not substantively add to the game, but there are some nice additions, like extra class magic effects, poisonable food and destructable items (they’re nice in game design terms, that doesn’t have to mean nice to the player).
The Youtube account Jess & Zac arguably likes the Gauntlet games even more than I do. In a 27-minute video, they give 100 little-known facts about G:DL. Just knowing someone else cares so deeply about the games was enough for me; the information that fans have made updates for the game to fix bugs is even better. I should seek that patch out! I’m entitled, or should be: I own a copy of the game on Gamecube! Also, the N64 and Dreamcast versions of Legends! Me and friends in college played so much of N64 Gauntlet Legends….
That video’s pretty short. They also have a much longer video (1 hour 27 minutes) that rates all 60 maps of Gauntlet Dark Legacy. That one’s rather more obsessive, but it’s not like I’m any strange to video game obsession (Rampart), and it’s a game that isn’t talked about nearly enough these days, at least within my hearing. They’re in order from worst to best, so maybe skip through to the end? Up to you.
I personally think Dark Legacy is a little too long. Gauntlet Legends, its predecessor, is thematically tighter, DL’s extra characters aren’t differentiated enough from the originals, and in the arcade it took many more quarters to get through DL. But I’ve played through both games, and I’d do it again. They’re a little mindless, but less mindless than they seem at first.
I wish Atari Games had stayed in business and allowed to keep iterating and improving on the Gauntlet games, and not closed by stupid corporate cost-cutting. The United States relies on corporations for so much of its creative presence, but regularly destroys huge portions of its culture due to being judged by clueless moneypeople who are way to sure of themselves. It’s a problem that other countries suffer from too, but no where else is it so bad. The US just decided that the skill and thought that all of Atari’s people, who had worked much of their lives making games, didn’t matter. It’s a damn crying shame, and it’s far from the only time it’s happened.
I like filling the posts on Set Side B with a wide-ranging field of material, but I realize this is pretty far out even for us. We’re about electronic entertainment, right? Cooking is entertaining, or can be! And websites of recipes are electronic!
I told you about Loadstar, the long-lived Commodore 64 disk magazine that I am involved in preserving. Well I was thinking about things I could draw out of the issues, that people to use. And I noticed the recipes.
Someone named James T. Jones submitted, and had published, over 280 recipes on Loadstar’s disks, over a period of nearly six years. I came to realize that I’ve written scripts to export and convert Commodore 64 text files from out of disk images. And everyone hates recipe sites on the internet, right? They’re all SEO-infected ad-soaked pages, and more and more AI slop is moving into that field. James Jones’ recipes don’t have any of that, and if I don’t care about improving their traffic or exploiting them for ad revenue I can make this resource available to everyone for free!
So I’ve added a subsite to my Neocities site, linking all the recipes that appeared in the disks of Loadstar 64. (I think there’s a few extras on Loadstar 128, I might add those later.)
Here is the intro page to the recipe site. Whether people will find it useful or not, who knows. These are the kinds of recipes that will casually use ingredients like Doritos, or ginger ale. I haven’t made any of these. A few of them look a bit suspect: the recipe for ice cream is surprisingly brief, one of the steps being to “follow the manufacturer’s instructions,” assuming you have an ice cream maker. But there seem to be a lot of other good recipes in there, if you explore a bit.
I’m still tinkering with the layout and text, but all of the content is there now. Bon Appétit!
