Tag: niche

Web-Wide Effort to Solve Every 5×5 Nonogram

This comes out from the halls of Metafilter, and a post there by Wolfdog. Pixelogic is a webpage where every 5×5 Nonogram puzzle (which you may know by the trademarked name Picross) is on a website, and as people solve them they’re marked off.

Part of the fun of most Nonograms is making a picture, and very few of these come out to anything. In the screenshot above 9,303,414 there looks like a crab, and the one above 9,303,408 whose number is cut off is obviously a helicopter, but the rest is pixel gibberish. It’s amazing, though, that one can make even that out of these random blobbies and garbages.

But on the flipside of that, 5×5 puzzles are really easy! It’s a simple matter to do one, and after that another, and so on, and then an hour has passed and you’ve finished hundreds. Add to that the job of just working on something with lots of other people, and you have a damn addictive time. The puzzle software is friendly too: left click to mark squares, right click to mark empties. The solver automatically marks Xs in spaces where they logically must go if you’ve filled all the spaces on a line of column. And unlike many of the Picross implementations on Nintendo systems, there’s no penalty for making wrong moves, although you’re not informed when you fill an incorrect square either.

To work on these, I suggest scrolling way down the page and finding a block of unsolved ones, as the site doesn’t filter out finished puzzles, and then working outward from there.

I realize I’ve assumed that you already know how to solve Nonograms/Picross here. A full description would be verbose and probably unneeded, especially since you can probably figure it out yourself by just looking at the solved puzzles on the site, but just in case:

You have a grid, right? Along the top and left side are numbers. The numbers indicate the runs of filled blocks in the solution of the puzzle. Take this example:

2 2 ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜

This horizontal line must have two sequences of filled blocks in the solution:

🟩🟩❌🟩🟩

That one was easy, but usually the full solution isn’t so, and must be deduced using the intersections of the rows and columns.

Try it out, but do it soon; more and more solvers are joining on every day, and even with 24M puzzles in the list they’ll probably churn through them all in around a month!

A Bunch of Sites You Should Follow

I think you might find it interesting or useful or entertaining, or some combination of the three, to have a list of interesting gaming websites to look through and follow. They’re all pretty cool; I’ve tried to weed out some that don’t update often, but sometimes the content on the site overrides that.

The three big indie gaming sites at the moment are Second Wind, the newly-liberated Giant Bomb, and Aftermath, even if they do annoy me greatly whenever they call blog posts “blogs.” I feel like they do it on purpose, or something. Take note that currently Second Wind does not actually have a dedicated website of their own; their internet presence is on other sites and services, especially Youtube and Discord.

Two sites I suggest avoiding are Kotaku, which is run by soulless drones, and, whenever possible, the vast array of Fandom.com sites. This is often not possible, as lots of people use them for free site hosting, but it’s frequently the case that Fandom doesn’t have its users’ interests foremost on its mind, and if a wiki creator decides to leave Fandom for green pastures, you’ll often end up competing with your old site, and it’ll come in ahead of your new site in Google searches for a long time after, maybe forever, because of their strong search engine optimization. Notably the Nethack Wiki had to fight against the ghost of their old selves for a long time, and the Fandom version of the site still, after over a decade, comes up in the first page of Google results. (A useful browser extension for Chrome and Firefox is Indie Wiki Buddy, which marks search results that turn up Fandom sites, while not removing them entirely in case they’re the only real option.)

Some other useful sites:

The Cutting Room Floor, of course, is an amazing resource, bringing together development information on thousands of games.

Hardcore Gaming 101 may be the website with the most complete information on all kinds of video games that exists, other than Wikipedia of course, and WP prioritizes general audiences, not enthusiasts.

Thrilling Tales of Old Videogames has had quite the uptick in posts lately, but always has something new and unexpected to say.

Gaming Alexandria is preservation-focused, and hosts scans of old gaming and computer magazines, including scans of Japanese type-in computer magazines, a category that has not been well-preserved in the West despite some programmers having moved into mainstream commercial development after having gotten their start with magazine publishing.

Game Developer Research Institute collects information on a vast array of companies and hosts a number of interviews with classic gamedevs too. They also keep an informative blog (being, a series of blog posts).

Computer Archeology updates but rarely, but has useful information on several classic arcade games. They’re the site that figured out the cause of the long-standing arcade Galaga bug that sometimes cause the enemy insects to stop firing.

Sonic Retro hosts a huge wiki on many topics related to the Sonic games.

We’re now moving into the category of personal sites, but don’t count them out because it’s mostly one or two people who make them!

Finally, more out of a sense of memory than anything else, there’s Press The Buttons, home of the blog and podcast of my late friend Matthew Green, currently still on the internet. I don’t know what will happen to it now that he’s gone. He wasn’t the only host of the Power Button podcast. I hope the surviving members keep it going. If they do, you should follow it, too.

Avoiding Walls in Mario Kart DS & Wall Assisted Super Bouncing

The gold standard of game breakdowns continues to be PannenKoek’s extremely detailed and approachable examinations of Super Mario 64, but there’s other people out there are also nerding out excessively over games.

Suuper W‘s makes videos about several different Mario games, but Mario Kart is their primary beat. They recently explained how Mario Kart DS detects when you’ve hit a wall. It’s worth a look if you want to either how the detection works, how it can be abused, or, just possibly, both. (14 minutes)

Also of interest is a video they’ve done about “Wall Assisted Super Bouncing,” a Mario Kart DS technique that can cause you to game big air and leap over barriers under the right conditions. It’s 11 minutes, and even if (as is likely) you’re not in the Mario Kart DS TAS speedrunning scene, it may be interesting for its look at the specifics of MKDS’s engine.

PAPAPinball’s Demonstration of High-Level Addams Family Play

I’ve seem lots of really great pinball on Youtube, even though with every extra one you watch there’s a danger Youtube will think that’s all you want to see for a while.

This particular 22-minute video is special for a few reasons. First, it’s made by Bowen of PAPA, the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association, which means you’re gonna see some really good play. Second, it’s two nice games in a row, despite the game being set to tournament settings, meaning, game rules are at their hardest or nearly so, and there are no extra balls. And third, both games achieve a respectable score, but they do so by completely different strategies. The first one goes for multiballs exclusively, and gets to over 200M mostly through jackpots. The second pursues Mansion Rooms, which is slower and a little riskier, but gets to over 300M.

Addams Family is, as the video mentions, the best-selling pinball machine of all time. It’s got several unique features to it. In many pinball games the modes mostly differ by the available shots, but Addams Family has a mode, Seance, that turns on spinning magnets beneath the playfield (“FEEL the POWER!”), so the game actually plays differently, physically, while it’s running. It’s worth a lot of points, but it’s also very easy to lose control of the ball during it.

Multiball on Addams Family, as shown, can also be worth tons of points. The Power magnets also run during it, but shots to the side ramp during it are worth a minimum of 20 million. Addams Family is from an age where ball savers are rare, if there’s any at all, so there is a very strong possibility you’ll just immediately fail out of multiball with nothing to show for it. The game does let you try to restart multiball if you earn no jackpots, but you’ll only have to balls and could well just fail out again.

High-level pinball play is about both quick reactions and careful strategy. Don’t take shots on the fly if you can help it, but try to dampen the ball’s momentum, trap the ball on the flippers, and make as many controlled shots as possible. During multiball, try to get all but one ball on the flipper you want to use the least, and use the other one to make the important shots. If the ball is on the wrong flipper, try to get it to the other flipper safely, using techniques like “post transfers.”

Good pinball takes lots of practice, and sometimes unlearning habits, but it’s a kind of play that not many real-time video games can match. For pinball’s a very honest game, there is rarely anything the game can do to covertly sabotage you (if the machine is maintained well), but its skill ceiling is infinite. You can always play better.

Space Quest Secrets

If it seems that a lot of the “niche” items here ending up being about Nintendo things, you’re not wrong. The fact is, lots of people talk about Nintendo, both the Nintendo of old (N64, Gamecube, GBA, DS), the Nintendo of very old (NES, Gameboy, SNES), the Nintendo of very old (Donkey Kong, Game & Watch), and once in a while, the Nintendo of even older than that. They have been making gaming equipment since the 1800s, after all!

With all that Nintendo talk, I’m positively desperate to find non-Nintendo things older than a certain age. And once in a while, I even find them.

That’s what’s served up today, a video list of 11 secret things about the Space Quest games. The absence of Space Quest games in the current era is one of the worst things about it, if there was any DOS-era game series that could stand a comeback that is IT. But in that terrible absence, here is a 27 minute collection, from Space Quest Historian, of interesting things about those games:

Included items:

  • The Cave Squid in Space Quest II doesn’t actually chase you: it’s a set encounter in a specific location.
  • In SQ6, in the German and French localizations, designer Scott Murphy rerecorded some lines he spoke as himself, in those languages.
  • A cheat to skip some of the Scumsoft area in SQ3.
  • In the Aptitude Test in SQ5, you can either look over the shoulder of another test taker to get the answers… or just answer the last choice for each question. That’ll also get you past that sequence.
  • Some planet names in SQ5 are obvious jokes, but one of them that seems to be a jab at rival adventure maker Lucasarts is instead (or maybe, also) a reference to the last name of a couple of employees.
  • A Sarien guard in SQ1, if you talk to them many times, will eventually reveal that they’re a Kings Quest fan, and six points are locked behind this easter egg, making it difficult to score a perfect game without prior knowledge. As it turns out, Ken Williams put this gag in the game himself.
  • Space Quest Historian insists that the games, in general, were not made harder to sell hint books. Instead, it was to increase the length of the game, as if you know exactly what to do a typical Sierra adventure can be finished in less than an hour.
  • The Datacorder puzzle in SQ6 wasn’t intended as copy protection. It was supposed to be clued in the game itself, but an oversight meant it was left out of the game, so the clues were printed in the manual.
  • In SQ5, there was an unexpected case of the game taking it easy on the player. If you don’t complete a necessary puzzle, at the very end, before escaping a spaceship set to self-destruct, the game won’t kill you as a final punchline, but actually put you back for another try.
  • The Duracell Bunny, better known to US players as the Energizer Bunny, in SQ4… they actually got permission to include the joke, but from the wrong people. Still they were never sued, possibly because the inclusion flew under the owner’s radar.
  • Rereleases of Space Quest games sometimes changed some of the pop culture references to make them less legally actionable. In all but one case, however, this was done preemptively, and no legal threat was actually made. It was just their lawyers playing it safe. The one time they got a Cease and Desist was when they included likenesses of ZZ Top in the VGA release of SQ1. They fixed this in a novel way: the interpreter program scans the play directory for alternate resource files, and if it finds them, will include them as alternate animations. They “patched” the game for later pressings by putting alternate versions of the singers, shrunk down so far as to be unrecognizable. This seemed to satisfy the group’s lawyers. But the original graphics are still in the game; if the alternate resource files are deleted (or just moved out of the directory), the ZZ Top parody will reappear.

If all of this is interesting to you, I encourage you to watch the video, where all of these things are illustrated in-game, and explained in far greater detail. Look and see!

Obscure Things To Do in Super Mario Galaxy

Mr. Goof on Youtube made a video with some cool and relatively unknown things that can be done in Super Mario Galaxy. Like the ground pound move in that game has a homing function, you can hold crouch to skate backwards on ice, and there is a secret button press that can give you a speed boost at the start of Cosmic Mario races. But none of those things are what they claim is the most obscure thing in the game.

The video is titled “Super Mario Galaxy’s Most Obscure Mechanic,” which is a bit wrong. It’s not a mechanic, or mechanism, it’s just a move with no real gameplay purpose. If you stand near water and jump, Mario will dive into the water with a special animation. That’s it. It’s cool, but pretty useless. Still, it’s nice to see it in action.

Here’s the video (7 minutes). Now, go forth and win Mario-related trivia contests, if they happen to ask a question about this extremely specific behavior.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Final Patch Animation

Larian Studios has announced the last Baldur’s Gate 3 content patch, and they commissioned a cartoon, from Spud Gun Studios, to commemorate it. It’s more mass-market than most of the things we present here, but eh, it’s the final patch. 4½ minutes:

The same people did some other animations over the past months as well, so we might as well make this a roundup post. They’re all official content.

Mod Support (3 minutes):

The game’s leaving Early Access (3½ minutes):

Christmas (3½ minutes):

And The Greatest Foe (a particular frog in the swamp, 2 minutes)—but Youtube’s awful policies think it’s made for kids, despite the frog getting murdered bloodily at the end, so they made it unembedable. YOUTUBE HAS DONE A STUPID THING, LET THIS ALLCAPS MESSAGE STAND IN TESTAMENT TO THIS RIDICULOUS FACT.

GVG: Wii Games That Used The Forecast Channel

Nintendo has a habit of, with each new console, throwing a bunch of features at the wall to see what’ll stick. Most things, let’s be frank, don’t.

Top of my head? The DS’s second screen? It worked for a while, but now seems pretty well an abandoned idea. The 3D features of the 3DS. StreetPass. AR games. Their brief experiments with free-to-play on the 3DS. The whole darn Virtual Boy. Need I go on?

One of these features was the idea of system-supported services that software could use to interact with the player outside of borders of their channel. Miis were the finest example of this, of course, and amazingly Nintendo hasn’t abandoned them yet, although ideas like Miis that could travel between systems on their own have been conveniently forgotten.

But on the Wii, there were a few less publicized things that games could do. Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel were known to send you messages on the system bulletin board to congratulate you on winning, or to give you hints of Stars to find.

About a year ago GVG did a recounting of Wii games that used, of all things, data from the Weather Forecast Channel. They pinned down nine pieces of software that did this. It’s a feature that Peter Molyneux notably abandoned when he directed Black & White (after announcing it), but Nintendo actually did it. Here is the video, which is a fairly padded 9½ minutes:

The title says nine games used it, but the channel only lists seven, and not all of them are even games! The software named:

  • Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (could be enabled in Options)
  • Nights: Journey Into Dreams (in the Nightopian garden)
  • My Aquarium and its sequel, WiiWare titles
  • Tiger Woods PGA Tour (enable in Options)
  • In Japan: Rilakkuma: Minna de Goyururi Seikatsu
  • WiiRoom, a Japan-only video-on-demand service

ZoomZike Examines Sonic Adventure 2’s Final Rush

Quick! Name a level in Sonic Adventure 2 that isn’t City Escape (the first level)!

You probably couldn’t think of one. Maybe Pumpkin Hill, from remembering its rap-based theme song? But one very distinctive level in that game is the last one on the Hero Side: Final Rush.

Wait, what do I mean by Hero Side? None of this paragraph really matters, but…. There’s two scenarios in it, the Hero story with Sonic, Knuckles and Tails, and the Dark story (the game shies away from the term Evil) with series debut characters Shadow and Rouge, and Dr. Robotnik, a.k.a. Eggman, playable. The story scenes from Sonic Adventure 1 were ditched in favor of a level select map, and the varied gameplay of the first game narrowed down to running stages (Sonic/Shadow), searching stages (Knuckles/Rouge) and shooting stages (Tails/Eggman). Gone were Amy and Big the Cat’s playstyles, and Omega’s were given over to Tails and Eggman.

Of course, everyone most loved the running stages. The game’s named after Sonic, after all, even though they had some issues. The issues, they were what many people who played the game remembered. Although the game is arguably an improvement on SA1, gave us more insight into Eggman’s history and motivations than we’ve ever had before or since, and even its lore plays a big part in the Sonic 3 movie, it’s still a 3D Sonic, and so it’s still seen as inferior to the Genesis originals. The 3D Sonic game released after Sonic Adventure 2 was Sonic Heroes, which was mostly about running; the searching and shooting gameplay seen in SA2 hasn’t to my knowledge returned since.

But as ZoomZike reminds us, there are interesting ideas in Sonic Adventure 2! He examines the last of the running levels (if you don’t count the very hard to unlock Green Hill level), in fact the last Hero Side level in the game.

Final Rush takes place in space (there’s still gravity though), and is themed around Sonic Adventure’s 2 new gimmick, rail grinding. You’ve shredded on rails throughout the game up to this point, but most of Final Rush takes place sliding around on rails improbably placed in Earth orbit. The level is rife with opportunities to send your pitiful blue garden mammal through a fiery reentry. My own memories of the level, like most of the game, involve camera struggles and fighting glitches, but I remember Final Rush being entertaining at least.

ZoomZike thinks the level was well-designed (23 minutes). Maybe you’ll agree.

Sundry Sunday: Parappa is Bad at Driving

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

It’s been ten years since a little line drawning animation called URappinBad! shows up on Newgrounds. Now its creator Kevin Fagaragan has gone back and not only made it into a full color animation, but shows it side by side with the original.

This is the new video (3 minutes), which has the comparison at the end, and its Newgrounds page:

And this is the original by itself (1½ minutes):

Be on the lookout for cameos by Parappa’s friends PJ Berri and Katy Kat, Cheap Cheap the Cooking Chicken, and UmJammer Lammy. Both videos of course feature music taken directly from the Playstation classic Parappa the Rapper, which still has one of the best soundtracks in gaming. They got the music stuck in my head all over again. “When I say boom boom boom you say bam bam bam, no pause in between! C’mon let’s jam!

More Mario Kart World Fake Ads

I mentioned these a few days ago, but my favorite part of Mario Kart games these days is the in-universe ads for various Mario-themed automotive products. Whatever world these games are set in, it obviously doesn’t have to worry about global warming, because not only are there plenty of vehicular support companies there, but they’re all either themed or named after some aspect of Marioness. We’re not told literally anything about these companies other than what we can glean their promotional imagery plastered all over the place, but I presume that the Mario characters aren’t just spokespeople/things, but actually own and run them.

In Mario Kart 8, Super Bell Subway was an extravaganza of environmental world building, implying far more about the Mushroom Kingdom than we ever hoped to get, and Mario Kart World is like an extended version of that. As with most Mario games, the only elements that will carry over between games are the ones Nintendo thinks are sufficiently marketable, and even then they’re known to throw out characters that fall out of favor (R.I.P. Toadsworth). But we might consider these glimpses as one version of what every day life in the Super Mario World might be like.

Check out the Mario Wiki page for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe: Super Bell Subway, which has a complete list of the signage used in that track. It also mentions that most of that game’s tracks are mentioned on the route maps in that course, as if you could hop a train and go there. Maybe it gave Nintendo’s designers the idea to make Mario Kart World a single cohesive map?

Anyway, here’s some more track signage from this heavily car-dependent version of the Mushroom Kingdom.

“Put it down Donkey Kong. No. Don’t eat the car! Bad ape!”
A sign seen on a high building in Crown City. Maybe this refers to Rainbow Road?
A movie poster seen outside of Boo Cinema in Crown City. I guess Peach isn’t just royalty in Marioland, but a movie star too. Boo Cinema seems to be a chain. They’re open all day and all year, in case you want to watch a movie at four in the morning on Christmas Eve. It’s all good, the ghost staff doesn’t need to sleep.
This seems like it might be a direct reference to the poster of some real-world movie, but I don’t know which it is.
Large poster on what I think is the Koopa Construction building. The big tire refers to the big tire looming over Crown City, I think.
The Dash company uses a standard Mushroom item as its logo.
“We Build Your Homes. We Build Your Towns. We Build Your Dreams. Koopa Construction.” Is it just me, or does that sound a bit sinister?
Why would penguins, who don’t need to sled, start a sled company?
Sorry for the poor quality, these are snipped from the Nintendo Direct video, and blown up really far too. Is that Peach’s crown?
Foo? Foo?? A Smokey Stover reference in this day, age and country of origin? I also don’t know what a Batadon is, but from the logo I think it’s a flying Easter Island head.
I’m sure there’s a good explanation for why the cosmic princess who travels the stars started a Greyhound competitor.
They added these signs to Toad’s Factory after the incident last month. That poor toad, maimed for life.

And, unrelated, under characters there’s this person:

Um, who in the name of the Question Block of Doom is that supposed to be?

Sundry Sunday: Cursed Images and Game Music

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

I think I’ve posted some of these before, but I don’t think I’ve done all of them, and I’m cleaning some links out of my list. So let’s take another look.

These are from a six-or-so year old meme that began with putting creepy (but not too creepy) music to battle music from perennial retro JRG favorite Earthbound. Earthbound had lots of weird and crazy enemies, so they fit fairly well. But they’re not all Earthbound collections, just so’s you knows.

I’ve got quite a few of these links. I could spread them across weeks, but I’ve got other posts to make, so I’ll just unload them all at once. Watch as many as you can stand.

First, the Earthbound collections. 3 minutes:

8 minutes:

Now, 9 minutes:

They’re getting longer in length. 12 minutes, if you’re getting tired of them I can’t say that I blame you:

This one’s 16 minutes:

And the mother (heh) of all collections, 51 minutes, using music from all three games:

The meme mutated a bit into science diagrams that look like shitposts, and with other game music. This one’s Miitopia (8 minutes):

And, with Splatoon music (11 minutes):

Last one! With Toby Fox music (13 minutes), you know, Undertale and Deltarune and stuff:

I’m glad to get those out of the list! Something different next time, whew.