The Flipside of Gaming
I had a car accident last night, and while it could have been much worse in retrospect, I’m still pretty shaken. So for today, let’s just relax and watch Twinbeard, who had been playing through every level and finding every goal, finally reach the end of Super Mario World. (18 minutes) Whew.
An internal Nintendo metaphor for the Wii’s UI was “more channels for the TV.” It’s a particularly Old Dad idea for the Wii really, as even at that time broadcast TV was beginning to decline in popularity, but it may have made more sense in Nintendo’s home territory.
The experiences of these channels, the Mii Channel, the News Channel, the Weather Channel, the Shop Channel and the like, are receding in memory, although there are fan efforts to revive them and connect them to new information sources. But at the other end of their development life, of their pre-release development very little has ever been known. Early Wiis had stubs in their place, that only directed the user to installing a launch-day update. (I experienced this myself! I drove 140 miles in order to wait in a line for a Wii on its launch day, November 19, 2006. I’m objectively insane.)
Those stubs weren’t the true original versions of the Wii Channels, they had been in development within Nintendo for some time. Those development versions of the Wii software have never been leaked outside the company, but there exists footage of them from various sources. Bjohn on Youtube has compiled what we know about the development Wii Channels into a 21-minute video. Here it is:
There’s a fair amount there, including early versions of the Internet Channel and early evidence of plans to include DVD support. (The Wii has a fully-operational DVD drive, but to avoid playing a license fee to the DVD Consortium it cannot play DVDs without hacks.)
Beta Wii Channels! (Bjohn on Youtube, 21 minutes)
Some years back, as a casual remark in a place that I don’t remember, I said that Nintendo has a problem with using ideas that they didn’t come up with in-house. “Not Invented Here Syndrome” I may have phrased it. I forget the context too. It may have had to do with their refusal to use rollback code in internet multiplayer gaming, but there are other time where it’s seemed that there are things that are solved problems everywhere else, that Nintendo still has trouble with.
One of these things has been Achievements, a platform-recognized system where a player’s accomplishments are registered and stored, that can be observed outside the game and shared with others. Achievements began with the Xbox 360, and were soon after implemented by Valve in Steam, as “Awards” by Sony in the Playstation ecosystem, and even by fans playing games and romhacks in emulators as RetroAchievements.
One company that’s always avoided using them, despite being the oldest major console publisher still in operation, is Nintendo. They’ve avoided any cross-game recognition of skill or accomplishment, even though they’ve come close multiple times. Several of their games offer in-game recognition of accomplishments, in the form of “Stamps” or “Trophies” or “Stickers.” Super Mario Galaxy would post images on the Wii message board when the game was completed. When Miiverse was a thing, players could share messages with earned stamps from some games. But none of these systems had sharing outside of their respective games or individual consoles. None promises any account-level recognition.
Why is this? Nintendo’s games are enormously popular, and many players have rued the absence of any support for an achievement system, and to this day show no signs of starting one. Why? It seems like such an obvious thing. Everyone else does it. It would probably heap more value upon Nintendo’s bottom line, so why not?
As it turns out, it goes back to their Not Invented Here Syndrome. The person at whose fee the blame trail ends is unknown, but the evidence is there, in an episode of the Kit and Krysta show, available as a podcast with excerpts on Youtube. Hosted by two former Ninendo employees, who ran a periodic show that was promoted for a time on the Switch’s News channel, they tell the story of what happened when another employee brought up the possibility of offering something like achievements at a meeting. The recounting is in this Youtube video (4 1/2 minutes), with the important bit starting around 2:07:
From the transcript (there are some minor errors):
“I remember I think you were in this meeting too this was like a pre E3
meeting somebody pretty high ranking got absolutely eviscerated in a meeting by another person who is very high ranking because they were they were suggesting doing something things in the style of micros why don’t why don’t we do like Xbox does this thing really well why don’t we do that and this was like a really like packed full meeting I’m and this person was like a senior director this person got eviscerated in that meeting of like we do things our way this is the Nintendo way we cannot simply follow the path of what Xbox like it was just like it went on and on I was like it was like a 20 minute lecture […]
so there you go yeah they definitely don’t want to do like copy their competitors but they also have that sense of like no everyone’s equal we’re equal opportunist gamers right I think they also see this as like this is not a pure way of experiencing a game like you rushing through it or like only focusing on this thing like that’s not how you should play a game I kind of agree with that cuz we did some dumb stuff get those achievements that’s true and then they also like want you to play that game in a very specific way so they don’t want you to use a different system to like do it your way because they want they’ve built this game specifically in the way that they think that you’ll enjoy it the most and they’re going to want you to do that[…]“
It’s a bit old, but Chaz on Youtube has a great video explaining some weird facts about Earthbound, including mysterious crashes, when the game registers the effects of statuses like Sunstroke, and why there’s a small number of places in the game where you can find an early enemy, the Mole Playing Rough, in regions where you usually find much stronger enemies. It’s ten minutes long:
Here’s the gist:
Earthbound maintains a flag that the video calls the Overworld Status Supression Flag. If this flag is on then your characters can’t get a number of statuses like Sunstroke, or take environmental damage. If this flag is on, though, and your party loses to a scripted (not random) battle, then a bug is triggered that’s popularly called the Game Over Glitch: the battle loss cutscene music plays, but the screen turns black and nothing appears to work. In fact, the game has not crashed: entering the Town Map screen, or feeling around for and entering a door, will display graphics again, although glitched out. The Game Over Glitch is best known for happening if the player loses to one of the Shattered Man fights in the Museum after the game has been won: during the ending, the Overworld Status Supression Flag is set on permanently, so getting into any scripted fight and losing will result in the glitch happening.
As it turns out, random encounters disable the flag. So there is a hard-to-avoid Mole Playing Rough at the entrances to areas with environmental damage, to make sure the flag is turned off. But the mole is just hard to avoid, not impossible, so if you can avoid it, and all other random enemies of course, and then reach a place with a scripted fight, then lose to it, the glitch will still happen.
Kaze Emanuar on Youtube passes along the info that Rare’s terrific N64 platformer, Banjo-Kazooie, has been decompiled (7 minutes):
What does that mean? It’s that they’ve created source code (up on GitLab) that, when put through the same C compiler that originally generated Banjo-Kazooie’s object code, produces an exact binary image of the game. They can now rebuild Banjo-Kazooie. They don’t know the original variable names or any comments that were in the code, so it doesn’t mean that the code is perfectly understandable, but it is a major breakthrough in using the game engine for other things, including game improvements, mods, repurposings, and even compiling it for other platforms.
One result of this is that we now have a complete list of the codes that can be entered into the infamous Sandcastle Room, which are obfuscated in the original binary. The Sandcastle Room is a board of letters on the ground in the second level that can be used to spell things out, and if the proper text is entered it can unlock things in the game, or even enable the items in the abandoned “STOP N SWOP” feature that had been planned to allow players to transfer data between cartridges. If you decide to take a look yourself, the codes are listed out in the file named code_3E30.c.
There’s this image going around, referred to in this video as a “greentext” image, in that way that people who are very online will just throw out there and expect that everyone knows what they’re talking about when other people (like myself) who are at least as online don’t know because they weren’t online in the same way. It seems that a “greentext” image is that way because it’s a quote in an old 4chan thread. Bleh.
But anyway. Said image is a list of obscure, but apparently canonical, facts about everyone’s favorite money-grubbing antiplumber, Wario. Narrator Mish Koz goes through each fact and tries to determine from whence it came. Many of them are sourced from an old Nintendo website. They’re entertaining at least, for 17 minutes. Here is the video:
The facts are:
Investigating the Wario Greentext (Youtube, 17 minutes)
It might not seem like it, but in the 8- and 16-bit era, text in a game was rather expensive.
The expressive power of an English sentence is great, but in a way, that of an equal number of bytes of assembly is greater, due to it living and working in the machine, and not just in the head of the player. A page of text is about 700 words; at an average of five characters each, uncompressed that’s 3,500 bytes, or 3.5 kilobytes. By contrast,the whole OS of the Commodore 64, Kernel and BASIC ROMs combined, is 8K.
Most JRPGs are thought to have lots of text, but really they have less than you might think. Square used a few tricks to make a little text seem like more than it really was: like the use of larger fonts, and using graphics to put on little skits to illustrate scenes instead of just displaying them as plain old words. And of course there’s compression. A good compression scheme, while troublesome for fan translators, can still cut down the size of text by half.
But Earthbound is a unique game in many ways, and one of them is the amount of text it has. Creator Shigesato Itoi is a copywriter and essayist, and he wrote a ton of words for Mother 2, Earthbound’s Japanese version. Translator Marcus Lindblom gave it a localization that many regard as one of the greatest of all, that manages to get across much of the wit and charm of the original.
It was a huge task. The text dump on GameFAQs, compiled by someone going by the name “BlueberryButtface,” is 391 kilobytes; the size of the game’s ROM is a bit over 3 megabytes. A direct comparison isn’t really helpful because the dump on the page is uncompressed, but it’s still useful to get a sense of scale.
A lot of this text, as it turns out, is hidden. Not in the sense of being locked off from the player, unused in the game. The text is findable in the game, but much of it is obscure, available only at a specific part of the game, or easy to miss. And, this being Earthbound, much of the text is pretty funny!
On Youtube (again), Cybershell has put together a 28-minute video that uncovers much of this hard-to find text. I already knew about much of it, because I’m weird like that, but it’s nice to have someone present a guide to what’s there and how to find it. A lot of it is the text of the Hint Guy, who, as in the style of Nintendo’s games at the time, will give you a pointer to whatever you have to do next in the story if you pay him a fee. All the hotels in the game have newspaper text appropriate to the point of the story you’re in, even the one way back in Onett, the starting town. Items have interesting descriptions if you think to ask for them. And of course, after you win the game, you can go back in and talk to the NPCs on the way back home, and frog help me, Shigesato Itoi wrote, and Marcus Lindblom translated, congratulatory text for nearly everyone in the game. And there’s more, even than that.
Here’s the video. It’s a fun use of half an hour, if you have any interest in Earthbound.
Rare and Obscure Dialogue in Earthbound (Youtube, 28 minutes)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s not always easy to find these kinds of videos? Youtube’s hated algorithm is heavily influenced by the last things you watched, so if you get in a mood to watch restorations of old arcade games, it doesn’t take many of those until your homepage is loaded with them, to the exclusion of other things.
And honestly, who beside me is going to link to videos like this, an animation of Link in Breath of the Wild, in the much appreciated by fans Gerudo Outfit, breakdancing out in the desert, with unexpected accompaniment? That’s what Sundays here are for folks. Showing you the things that Youtube doesn’t want you to see, if only by accident (30 seconds).
When you’re attacking Vah Naboris but the music is really good (Youtube, animated, 30 seconds)
Generally it’s considered that arcade Donkey Kong was the product that put Nintendo on the video game map, but Nintendo’s Game & Watch line actually predates it by a year. They licensed it to Mego, the company that made those highly collectable large-scale action figures of pop culture characters, and Micronauts.
The Video Game History Foundation found Mego’s commercial for “TOSS UP,” what they called Ball, and branded under their name for Game & Watch products, “Time Out,” and put it–guess where? Yeah it’s on Youtube again (46 seconds):
We already linked to what turns out to be Part 1, back on Monday. This is Looygi Bros’ part two, nine minutes long:
Here’s our post on Part 1, and here’s a link to its video.
Looygi Bros. tends to make a series of videos on topics, so there will probably be a Part 3, and more. Instead of linking them all individually, I may wait for a bit and collect them all into one post, or maybe even add them to this post retroactively.
Here are the glitches in Part 2 listed out and explicated:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Six years ago brentalfloss did a parody video of the infamous “DK Rap” from the opening of Donkey Kong 64, updated for the times. It’s hilarious, but also disturbing and sad. Summary: Donkey Kong became a gun nut, Diddy is a MRA incel jerk, because of Tiny bees are dying out, Lanky’s the reason this video is NSFW, and Chunky’s… well, you can find out for yourself.
It’s all pretty saddening, but truthfully in line with how game culture has gotten worse over the years too. Ah well, at least Parappa’s still good and pure!
DK Rap 2018, “Where are they now” (brentalfloss on Youtube, 4 minutes)
More and more I find I should do a blog search to make sure that I haven’t posted something before, and my search for this video didn’t find it. It did find our link to the Copetti Site’s discussion of various console architectures, and a separate link specifically to their explication of the SNES’ construction, but not this particular video from NESHacker, so it’s fair game. Post! (zoop)
It’s only about nine minutes long so you can guess that it doesn’t go into deep detail. Essentially the NES is split into two parts, the CPU and its memory, and the PPU graphics chip and its own memory. A lot of classic consoles and microcomputers had to take special measures to support their display, which often ended up being the most complex part of the unit. Think about it: you have what amounts to a deluxe broadcast character generator right there in a box on your desk, shelf or floor, with lots of extra bells and whistles besides. (In fact, home computers were often used to generate current events channels for local cable companies, and an Amiga was essentially the basis for the old Prevue Guide channel.) It’s like a tiny special-purpose, single-receiver TV station just for your own use.
Graphics hardware is extremely timing sensitive. It has to generate the signal for your TV to display according to standardized picture generation requirements, so special requirements are often necessary. In the Commodore 64, for instance, the VIC-II graphics chip has the power to actually put the 6510 CPU to sleep, so it can have unrestricted access to the computer’s memory, without fear of bus conflicts, when it’s needed. This reduces the overall speed of the processor by a bit, and it’s why C64s turn off the screen when loading programs from cassette tape, in order to keep the CPU timing consistent relative to the data being streamed in off the tape.
The NES gets around this by giving the PPU RAM and address bus for its own exclusive use, and to put stuff in it the CPU has to use the PPU as an intermediary. And what’s more the NES exposes both the CPU and PPU’s address busses through the cartridge connector (which is why it’s got so many pins), allowing carts to supply dedicated ROM and RAM to both chips.
Even though it’s just a high-level overview, I found it a worthwhile use of those nine minutes, and you may very well enjoy it too.
NES Hardware Explained (from NESHacker, on Youtube, 9 minutes)