Nintendo’s announced that Mario Paint has been released on Switch Online, a movie that I modestly point out that I called some time ago, although I hoped they’d offer an export option that would let you make easy use of your creations, although one can use the Screenshot button to save your creation probably. It’s not the subject of today’s post, but their announcement’s pretty entertaining, so here it is (4 minutes):
The announcement mentions that one can use the restore states built into the emulator to save your work, which is at least better than the single save file available in the cartridge, or “saving” your work to VHS tape as the manual suggested. Another thing mentioned in the announcement is that, not only can people use the Switch 2’s Joycons as mice to replicate the function of the SNES Mouse that came with Mario Paint and required it, but in an uncharacteristic bit of generosity, it also supports USB mice when used on the original Switch models.
Mario Party is an interesting piece of gaming history. Without it, Homestar Runner probably would never have happened. Five years ago H*R posted bits of Mario Paint work to social media on Thursdays, which they compiled in this video (4 minutes, sadly not able to be embedded).
That’s two videos already and neither are the focus of this post, so what is? This digitization of an official Japanese Mario Paint tape was uploaded by Jeremy Parish, it’s 31 minutes, and shows off some frankly amazing creations that were made in the days where you had to actually use the mouse to make Mario Paint creations, without resorting to outside tools or memory manipulation. Surprisingly, it also bears the logo of APE Inc. Shigesato’s company that made Earthbound! Here here, it is this this:
One more note about the announcement video! It mentions that Mario Paint songs have been added to the Nintendo Music cellphone app. It also shows off “Title Theme 2,” which actually isn’t in the app, but is revealed to be Totaka’s Song! Maybe it’ll be added at a later date?
I’ve had a number of ideas for big posts lately, but those all take substantial time to make and finish. But I want to post something, so here are the directions my explorations have taken me lately.
Loadstar has a number of interesting things in it, including a trove of Print Shop clip art and (surprisingly) over 200 recipes. It’s full of those kinds of thing.
Action Retro just posted a new video on using the Apple Lisa (15 minutes), including browsing the internet on one, although on a text-based browser. A text-based web browser, on the first commercially-sold GUI OS, how about that!
Been back playing the Pac-Man Championship Edition Famicom demake on Namco Museum Archives Volume 1 on the Switch 2. It’s not really what I’d call a demake though, because it’s really good, in fact it might secretly be the best Pac-Man CE game, which isn’t meant to slight the others. It occurs me that I’ve learned a huge amount about all the games in the series, and I should try to get that information out onto the internet. I’ve got a WIP document about that, and I’m sure I’ve got some previous attempts at writing one in the archives somewhere.
Continuing on that thread, I’ve also learned that “Shadow Labyrinth,” that Metroidvania Bandai-Namco’s made with a truckload of classic Namco references including a spherical robot character called Puck, has a mini-game in it that is heavily inspired by the Pac-Man CE games, down to using some of its music. It isn’t scored the same though, and doesn’t seem properly set up for score attack play. It seems to follow along with some of the ideas they used in Pac-Man CE 2+’s two player mode, which I thought didn’t work very well.
Been wanting to investigate some C64 BBSes, but to do it proper you need a terminal that supports PETSCII. I have one, but I really want to get it working through C64 emulation.
There’s also the matter of getting the custom version of Kirby Air Ride set up with their bespoke version of Dolphin for netplay. I’ve already posted multiple times about KAR lately so I’m reluctant to make a full post about it again until I’ve had a chance to try it for myself.
Jeff Gerstmann got sent a message that suggests something you’ve probably never considered, that Mr Do! is real:
People say that you should turn off notifications and live your life and all that, but if I did that I wouldn't occasionally get a buzz on my wrist and see that some maniac has sent the phrase MR. DO! IS REAL to me.
The player can switch their switch themselves by pressing L and R, but only by pressing in, not out. Doing so both changes the state of all the switch blocks, and makes the switch itself much shorter. In play terms, this is equivalent of Super Mario shinking and becoming Regular Mario, and in fact getting hit by an enemy has the same effect, resulting in being switched prematurely, and all the blocks changing state too. To switch back, you collect a P Switch item, which is essentially a Super Mushroom, restoring both the player’s state and reswitching all the blocks.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
othatsraspberry is a hilarious maker of comics and has a Bluesky account. One of the things they’ve made comics about is the Metal Gear games, a surpassingly fertile ground for visual weirdness, because the games themselves are often very weird. (FISSION MAILED)
That’s right, no video today! We can do other things on Sundays than linking to video! And not Nintendo either! Let us rejoice in a world without Mario, for 24 hours at least!
Here is one comic, to give you a taste. For more, hie the away to that Bluesky feed or comic page!
Source: othatsraspberry’s comic archive page
An extra for you. We’ve had two items on Kirby Air Ride lately so I figured I wouldn’t devote a whole post to this, but if you still have room for more (Kirby always has room for more), the first game in this tournament match between Awsm_599 and heynoww has to be seen to be believed. The full video is 23 minutes, the relevant section is the first 7½ minutes, but if you stick around it also ends in an unexpected way. It’s a demonstration of why it’s important not to be too careless when playing City Trial. (I notice that I had linked to the end of that first round in the last KAR post, but the whole game is a nailbiter.)
Possibly
As it turns out, I linked a video today after all. It’s a hard habit to break.
Some days I write explanations of Kirby Air Ride City Trial netplay. Some days I write guides to new web media sites. And some days, I found a silly shooter on Youtube that I feel you have to know about. Guess which today is, boing!
I honestly never got into Touhou-style games, even though I know they’re popular and influential. Maybe I’d like them if I gave them a shot, but there’s so many other things to explore out there, I just haven’t found the time.
That Touhou style, and their tremendous Japaneseness is part of what The Girl From Gunma Kai has going for it. According to its instruction screens, it’s a spinoff from a light novel from 2014, and a sequel to a short tie-in game to that novel. It’s on Steam for $10, which may seem a bit much for a relatively short game that purposely chases the MSX aesthetic, with backgrounds that don’t move smoothly but lurch along character block grid, and with large characters that overwrite the background they appear in front of. But that’s just the kind of thing it is.
It’s certainly got tons of personality. While you control a flying anime girl who blasts animals, daruma and steam locomotives(?), a large distracting version of that girl resides in the border, dancing to the music. The “dancing” mostly means being horizontally mirrored to the beat, meaning the feathers in her hair swap sides every frame. In the upper-right corner appear descriptions (and English translations) of the various enemies the girl attacks, giving you helpful information on them, like that this one is made of two different-colored sprites, and that one happens to be delicious to eat.
It’s still an entertaining game to watch. Here’s a one-credit playthrough, although it doesn’t earn all the letters in NEPTUNE (a reference to the Neptunia games) so doesn’t get to go on to the secret end stages. It’s 31 minutes long, but if you don’t have an affection for this kind of fare you probably won’t watch it all. A few minutes will give you the idea. (I did watch the whole thing, mind you.)
At the end of the instructions, it says: The game includes a strong homage to the MSX which (creator) HUGA dearly loves, particularly aiming for the cheap rough-around-the-edges vibe of CASIO-made games. Back in the day, there were tons of these unpolished games, and we think there’s room for at least one today. We hope this game sparks a wave of cheap, carefree and delightfully crude games flooding the world—games you can play without overthinking it.
HUGA, you and me both. I love both your style and your affection for that era. May The Girl From Gunma Kai take over the world!
A lot of your less tech-savvy people look upon computer chips as some kind of magic, at least judging by how Hollywood movies depict hacking. And aliens can take control of computer systems just by inserting part of themselves into some console and sort of glowing while ominous music plays on the soundtrack.
But everything that happens in a processor is the result of simple logical operations: ANDs, ORs, NOTs, XORs and memory, all connected in different ways. And there’s some redundancy in that list: some of those logic gates can be constructed out of the others. The whole point of computers is you can perform billions of simple operations in a second, and complex operations are made out of lots of simple ones. When you’re working with binary numbers, all you need are simple operations.
Because of this, computers can actually be built out of physical parts, without even electricty, they’ll just be much bigger, and slower, and less durable, and may need some motor attached to them. Mechanical calculators have existed since the 1700s, and in the 50s-70s were common sights in offices. Arguably the first general-purpose computers, Charles Babbage’s Difference Engines (Wikipedia), were made from mechanical parts, but they had the disadvantage of not being made out of colorful pieces of plastic.
Shadowman39, an artiste who works in the medium of K’nex, has made a number of devices out of those construction toys, but an ALU, an Arithmetic Logic Unit that can increment, add, AND and XOR two binary numbers, is probably his most “practical” creation. He shows it off in this 15 minute Youtube video:
I want to see an alien that can nebulously control that monstrosity.
This ALU is one part of a larger processor project that’s still being built. I hesitate to call it a “microprocessor,” maybe we should call it a macroprocessor. We wish Shadowman39 the best, and hope he has enough time, energy and parts to realize his wondrous, ludicrous dream.
Some time ago on Game Developer I did an interview with the creator of the classic Mac, Apple II and C64 programming game Chipwits, who were working on a modernized version. Well their efforts have been released to the public now: Chipwits 1.0 is now out on Steam!
You devise programs using a graphic interface to get a robot character through a maze-like grid world to do various things. The original Chipwits was written for the original Mac, in Forth, with ports for different machines of the time. The new game has a nice tutorial as well as new scenarios, in addition to the scenarios that came with the original game.
The thing I like about Chipwits is, it isn’t always about solving specific puzzles. Many of the maps are open-ended. The robots have a limited amount of fuel, which translates into machine cycles to run your programs. Additional fuel can be replenished by objects found in their exploration, as well as objects worth score, but the objects are frequently randomly placed. These scenarios aren’t about tailoring a program to a specific placement objects, but devising a more generalized exploration routine that can adapt to a variety of placements. There are online leaderboards so you can see how your coding skill compares with that of other players.
Chipwits usually goes for $15, but for launch is currently 10% off on Steam. (Disclaimer: I interviewed the Chipwits people for Game Developer previously, and did a little beta testing, but I bought my own copy of the game for these screenshots. They deserve the money!)
There is a whole developing competitive scene around Masahiro Sakurai’s hugely underrated racing/combat game starring colored blob-monsters, Kirby’s Air Ride. (Previously: about City Trial, Sakurai talks KAR, stats explainer video). It’s like F-Zero, but cuter, but also meaner. Its standout mode, City Trial, is possibly Sakurai’s greatest creation, yes more than Smash Bros., yes more than Kirby themself. If you’ve never tried it, it’ll be hard to picture. I linked to my previous explanation, but here’s a quick summary.
Up to four Kirbys (including possible computer Kirbys) roam around an open world map that’s not too big, but not too small either. They start out with weak star vehicles, but there are better/weirder/different replacement vehicles randomly scattered around the map. There’s also “patches,” each of which is a small but significant improvement to one stat, randomly placed too. For 3-7 minutes, everyone tries to get the vehicle most suited to their play style, and as many powerup patches as they can. But they can also attack each other, using powerups that are also, yes, randomly scattered around. There’s also random events that occur. And Legendary Machine parts to collect. After time runs out, all the players are thrown into a random contest. Surprise! You were collecting Glide powerups the whole time, but you’re in a race event! Or you got Top Speed powerups, but you’re in a battle event! You don’t know which event will happen. Everyone’s often given a strong clue, but it isn’t always accurate!
City Trial is a great spectator game. It’s fun watching human players zoom around building their machine’s power, and sometimes savagely tearing at each other with all the ferocity a cute blobular creature can muster. Each Trial is a little story to itself, its participants struggling to increase their power in the limited time. Which a single patch isn’t much, really good players can scoop up over 100 of them in the short period allowed, and machines rapidly advance from merely fast to pure manifestations of bewildering, near-uncontrollable speed. Then the contest is chosen, it’s over in less than a minute, and the next round begins, everyone back at square one. It’s so intense.
Kirby Air Ride was one of a very small number of games to use the Gamecube’s Network Adapter, meaning it supports LAN play, and through that function rabidly enthusiastic players have turned it into an internet-capable game. KAR, as it is amusingly called, has been further hacked to make it more suitable for competitive play.
The community has a homepage with details on how to get involved and downloads for their customized version and emulator, a Youtube channel with loads of great matchups, and a Discord. Here are a few matches to show you what I mean.
I post two complete matches below, here’s some things to watch for:
The star each Kirby starts with is the Compact Star, which has good default turning and acceleration but little else. Particularly, its Defense is the absolute worst, and no number of Defense patches will improve it!
Each stat except HP can get up to 18; HP tops out at 16.
Stats from patches are multiplied by the stats of the vehicle the player is riding. A high vehicle stat means each patch will make the effect even greater!
Players can hop off their star at any time. While not on a vehicle will point out the location of other stars within the field of view.
When a player is attacked, they usually drop a patch, which the attacking player may be able to snatch away.
If a player’s star gets destroyed, they drop a lot (although not all) of their patches onto the ground. Players can’t collect patches while not on a vehicle, so the attacker can scoop many of them up unchallenged!
If time runs out when a Kirby isn’t on a star, they’ll be given a Compact Star for the event, which usually means they’ll lose.
The Shadow Star (the purple glowing one) has the highest attack but low defense. The Wagon Star (like a pink cube) has very high health and defense, but can’t boost, so isn’t great for racing. Both tend to be strong choices.
Patches can generate out in the open, but blue boxes can drop from one to four of them when broken open.
Gray patches are power-downs.
Scattered around the map in some matches are Legendary Machine parts. If one player collects all three parts of a Legendary Machine, they get it immediately, and it replaces the machine they had before. There are two of these, the Hydra, a big green monster with extremely high attack but that needs charge boost power to even move, and the Dragoon, a red/white wing with very high maneuverability, flight and speed. Completing either one usually, but not always, spells victory in a match; Hydra particularly can be stunlocked before it can move during the end-of-game contest, and worn down before it has a chance to react. There are rules to how Legendary Machine parts can appear: they always generate from Red boxes, and appear in certain parts of the map, at certain times.
The patches also have patterns to how they appear. The probability of finding different patch types is a subtle clue for which contest will occur.
While a few of the references in this 1 hour, 25 minute video by torkirby may seem half-baked, they’re greatly out numbered by the ones that seem dead on. A lot of Kirby’s staff, especially in the area of music, have been with the series a long time. People try to leave Kirby’s presence, but they keep suckin’ them back in: even Masahiro Sakurai is returning to direct another Kirby game, with Kirby Air Riders slated for the Switch 2!
Speaking of which, I have a post in the works about the rising netplay esports scene around City Trial in the original Air Ride. That looks really interesting!
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
Writing about Nintendo fangames is fraught. Not that something might happen to me, the insidious grasp of their legal team doesn’t stretch that far yet, but for the games being written about. Remember AM2R, a fan remake of Metroid II that many believe was superior to Nintendo’s own revision? Then some big sites mentioned it, Nintendo heard about it, and they sent the creator a nastygram demanding they take it down. Set aside the fact that the game can still be readily obtained from numerous other sources; it still dumped a big bucket of freezing cold water on the hard work of its maker, which is hardly a way to treat fans, especially since the company’s prosperity depends on their good will. Nintendo must be really certain those enthusiasts won’t reject them.
About our own blog, I don’t think anyone at Nintendo personally reads Set Side B. I’m sure their well-paid legal staff has plenty better things to do than read an obscure little daily retro/niche/indie blog, even if it’s one that posts articles on their products really often. But it does seem possible that someone at Nintendo might run a spider, an automated program that scans the internet for derivative works related to their products.
Not romhacks, mind you. For some reason Nintendo doesn’t take a lot of interest in romhacks of their work in most cases. But fanwork that uses their IP in one way or other has been known to attract the attention of the legal Warios. That is why AM2R got stomped upon by the Kuribo’s Shoe of Civil Law, and it’s why Zelda Online had to retitle to Graal Online (a project that continues to this day under that name).
I tell you this so you’ll know why I don’t give the full name of the project I’m going to refer solely by the second half of its title: Dungeons of Infinity. Any person looking at the screenshots will be able to easily tell what game it’s referring to, and uses assets from, but web crawlers won’t, or at least I won’t make it any easier for them than the Youtube videos that contain footage of its play. If you figure you want to try it, which I hope you will, if you search for it you’ll probably find it. I’ll help you out by telling you it’s not the board game Dungeons of Infinity, which had a Kickstarter in 2024. Many of the top hits for that phrase will be about that, but not all of them. I trust you’ll be able to tell them apart.
(mumble) is gray here because he’s been cursed! Curses rarely and randomly spring from chests that are opened, and impose some restriction upon play, like making shops sell things for higher prices, or making hearts hurt you instead of heal. Each curse has a randomized lifting requirement.
Most of the things I like about (mumble mumble): Dungeons of Infinity are not related to the game from which it borrows. If they could find some helpful people to make similar graphics in the same style, and changed the name, they might be able to escape danger entirely, but that might require time and effort the creator doesn’t have. Whatever be its trappings, it’s a pretty cool random dungeon exploration game in its own right. It has a pretty active Discord. Its creator mentions there that they’ve recently lost interest in working on the game so its current version, 1.2.1, will probably be its last. It’s still pretty cool as it stands.
So the idea is, like in the other games in the series of, um, The Saga of Fitzgerald’s Wife, is to pilot a green-suited elf kid through dangerous and tricky dungeons and caverns full of monsters and traps, collecting items and uncovering secrets. What’s different is that the game is much more linear than those other games (much like the Four Swords Adventures titles), and the rooms and their arrangements are randomly determined. So… also like the Four Swords Adventures games, although this one is purely for solo play.
The Armos Knights, from The Saga of Fitzgerald’s Wife: A Connection to Previous Times, are much harder than in the original, without their former weaknesses. Arrows don’t seem to even harm them. (EDIT: DoI’s creator reached out and said they are vulnerable to arrows, it’s just the last phase of the fight, when there’s just one left,that it becomes immune.)
If you explore throughly enough you’ll always find a way forward, the game isn’t designed to give you unsolvable situations. But what can change, and quite a lot at that, is the items that you find. Weapons like the Bow, the Hookshot or the Boomerang have to be found, or sometimes bought, if you want to use them. None of these items are required to win, but without certain items, like Sword and Tunic upgrades, or extra Heart Containers, you’ll find the going much more difficult.
There are some pretty tricky secrets in this game. Try to remember all the different ways things could be hidden in the previous game.
In fact, probably the game’s biggest drawback is that it falls prey, a bit, to fangame difficuly malaise. Bosses that in the original game aren’t hugely difficult here are tenacious damage sponges. Everything in the game has been tuned to be that little bit more difficult: you have less health, sources of healing are less common, and enemies take more damage. Due to the nature of difficulty, all of these individual sources of peril multiply together and become much harder than the sum of its parts. And (mumble mumble): Dungeons of Infinity is a permadeath game: if you take too much damage and run out of hearts, the adventure ends, so to keep going you have to start over from the beginning, fighting all the early enemies once again, and building a whole new collection of random items. If you’re not up for a challenge, well, you probably shouldn’t bother downloading it.
Here’s some details that it might be useful to know:
To be frank, the many dark rooms in (mumble mumble) Dungeons of Infinity are probably my least favorite part of it. You don’t get the helpful cone of vision in dark areas here, and lit torches only light up a small area around them. There is an item that can give you a bit more visibility.
You have a very limited inventory space. You can only hold five items by default. The bow & its arrows count as separate items too, as do your bombs and any healing items you find. You can find, or (more likely) buy inventory expansions, and there are items that help keep other items from taking up inventory spaces, but you’ll frequently have to make difficult choices for what to keep.
On the other hand, items you drop, or don’t have room to collect, don’t disappear. They’ll remain on the ground in the room they were dropped or found in until you come back for them, or else take the downstairs (you don’t get to backtrack to previous floors). If you hold off on collecting hearts when you’re at full health, then when you do take damage, you can come back to pick them up later.
Aiding in this, enemies that you defeat never return. It’s possible to clear whole dungeon floors of monsters, making them much safer to explore.
In the bottom-right corner of the HUD, there’s a vertical map of all the dungeon levels, which gives you the low-down on where the bosses are. It also marks the location of save points. In the true spirit of permadeath these points are only for taking breaks, not for continually restoring from, but seeing as how the game is fairly long it’s good to take advantage of them, and refresh the mental batteries for a bit before tackling the next leg of the quest.
It’s a shame that it’s pretty far into the game, but in the rebel village area on the 6th floor there’s an arcade with a pretty decent remake of arcade classic Berzerk in it, as well as an endless runner version of Pitfall with a recreation of the music from Pitfall II: Lost Caverns! If you get a few rooms into the Berzerk remake, you’ll find another mini-game, within that mini-game. I don’t know how deep this recursive ouroboros of gaming goes, but it’s a very nice touch.
This is a screenshot of the Berzerk remake in the village arcade. I wish this and the Pitfall-inspired endless runner could be played stand-alone!
After a year in the works, ZoomZike’s epic in-depth series examining each game in the Mario Party series has reached the Nintendo DS version, and as always it’s very long (4½ hours this time!) and extremely detailed. The title makes it sound like it’s got a very narrow focus, but the Identifying Luck in Mario Party series is more like a comprehensive review of nearly every aspect of the Mario Party series. They’re among the best game breakdowns you can find on Youtube!
ZoomZike doesn’t just cover Mario Party games on his channel, and we linked to his video on Sonic Adventure 2’s Final Rush level, but the Mario Party series is probably his greatest achievement, and are like a complete strategy guide and a course on game design all in themselves.
“What should tomorrow’s post be? On the ancient C64 GEOS operating system? On weird finds in Mario Kart World? More on Kirby Air Ride? Wait, what was it that starts on the 6th again?”
