A service Nintendo offered, and even more incredibly still offers, is to make customized playing cards for people, anyone, although the stated purpose is to promote products. The blog beforemario tells all about the service, and even links to Nintendo’s page where you too can order custom playing cards, and all you have to do is order them in a batch of at least 3,000 decks, oh and also navigate through the entirely-Japanese order site. Or you could just buy non-customized cards, some with Nintendo character art.

Lest the domain name not convince you that this is the same Nintendo, one of the example decks pictured uses Pikachu in its art (along with the appropriate copyright notices, as Nintendo doesn’t actually own the Pokémon characters).

beforemario has mentioned before that Nintendo still runs a large sideline in making traditional Japanese gaming equipment like Go and Shogi sets, or Chinese Mah Jong sets.

rodneylives

Tomodachi Life is a big release from Nintendo, its first real use of their once-starring Mii characters since the quirky and underappreciated Miitopia, which basically puts your little pseudo-people through a D&D campaign, an idea so cool that I had it myself over a decade ago, though of course no one listened to me way back then, or really ever.

Let’s remember what Miis are. The name itself is a reference to the characters’ origin system, the Wii. You see, you just flip the W. The Wii was extremely popular, and opened up video gaming to hitherto unserved demographics, but because most “gamers” are entitled jerks they spread bad vibes about the system despite its popularity (remember “waggle?”), taking its sequel system entirely. Nowadays, Nintendo Switch Sports and Miis are probably its sole remaining legacy, regardless of how many other cool ideas it had. (A version of Opera made for it! News and Weather Channels! In Japan you could order pizza using it! I haven’t even gotten to Check Mii Out and Everybody Votes yet.)

This is the third game in the Tomodachi Life series. The first one was 14 years ago, the original Tomodachi Life for 3DS, got a cult following. It’s kind of Nintendo’s version of The Sims, if the Sims had (very) slightly more self-motivation, no mandatory biological need to fulfil, and an emphasis on weirdness. The second game, the sorely-missed Miitomo, was a free-to-play mobile game that also served as an instant messenger, but it hit sadly at a time when the old style of instant messenger apps were dying out, and lasted just over two years. It was dead in the water long before it closed.

What all the Tomodachi Life games really are is an elaboration of the old game of Mad Libs. “Hey _name_, I’m going to _place_! Should I pick up a _noun_ while I’m there?” Except it’s not just with words, but people too, your Mii characters fill in the role of actors in the many silly little vignettes built into the software. The game includes no characters on its own: you create everyone in the whole damn town, name them, pick how they look, and rate their personalities in five categories, then plop them onto the island and watch them bounce off each other.

Sometimes when they meet you’ll be asked to give the system a word or phrase for them to talk about, and that’s where the more explicit Mad Lib connection kicks in. Just like official Mad Libs*, Maybe nine times out of ten the jokes will fall flat, but that tenth time is comedy gold. Of course what everyone did, and still does, is make Miis of every celebrity and comic character they can fit into Nintendo’s limited yet oddly useful tools. In my game, I have a Mr. T character, downloaded from the Mii Channel on the Wii so very long ago, laboriously schlepped over to Wii-U (via system import) to Switch (via Amiibos) to Switch 2 (via another system import). Mr. T had a dream his first night in my game, on the isle of Yendor, in which he met three other Miis all with Mr. T’s face.

I’d love to show you the video of his dream, but I forgot to record it. Also, though, Tomodachi Life: Live the Dream has a fatal flaw. It’s a meme gold mine, sure, but Nintendo has disabled all media sharing from it. You can make all the great Miis you want, but no one else will ever see them! Its drawing tools are pretty darn impressive, but nothing you make with them can be shared on the internet! You can’t upload them to the Nintendo Switch smartphone app, or even transfer them to your cell phone using Nintendo’s stupid Wi-Fi system! I don’t know if you can get them right off an SD card, but ha ha, on the Switch 2 it doesn’t matter because it uses incompatible SD Express cards!

NINTENDO, ARE YOU LISTENING? WHY CAN YOU EVEN TAKE SCREENSHOTS OR VIDEO AT ALL IN TOMODACHI LIFE IF YOU CAN’T SHARE THEM? Nintendo is a company used to doing things its own way, which sometimes results in moments of brilliance, but at least as often means they do amazingly stupid things like this.

Because of this, you will have to live with potato-quality screen photos, taken with my very own smartpotato. I plant them below. Imagine how much better these would be if Nintendo actually officially supported the use their software was obviously made for. (Note: I’ve been told since writing this that you can still get images off using an SD card… although if you have a Switch 2 like I do you’re probably just as out of luck as it uses SD Express cards. I’ve yet to confirm cross compatibility with those, I don’t think I have the right kind of adapter.)

Below is my absolute favorite of all the Mii interactions I’ve seen so far. Poor Patricia’s got it bad, and truthfully, I felt much the same way back in 2008. I kind of feel that way now, but sadly both his terms are up.

* BTW, did you know Mad Libs was co-created by Leonard Stern, who wrote many scripts for The Honeymooners, and wrote for and executive produced Get Smart?

rodneylives

The weirdnesses continue…. The cartridge has mock-up art on it that looks like the “black-box” trade dress early NES games had. The chips on the cart are mask ROMs, not EPROMs. In the attract more scroll, arcade names are used for some of the fighters, like Pizza Pasta, Piston Hurricane and Vodka Drunkinski.

rodneylives

The Wizard stars Fred Savage of The Wonder Years, a popular show that you barely hear anything about any more. Like thirtysomething, remember that? I don’t either.

Many of my nights lately have been consumed with trying to play enough Caves of Qud so that I don’t embarrass myself too badly when I finally decide to talk about it. Most of my early explorations were in permadeath Classic Mode, but I have come to realize that playing it that way would mean I would need several years to finish it. I may not actually finish it before I write on it. On Nethack I had the advantage of being obsessed with it for years, had read many spoilers on it and participated on the Nethack Usenet group. These days much discussion of that nature has moved onto Reddit, which I have strong moral qualms about visiting now, not to mention that its app sucks on toast.

Well, back at it. Send fresh water.

rodneylives

I’m not happy with the clickbait title The Game Display chose for this video, claiming they found a “golden mushroom” in Super Mario Bros. 3 like it’s some actual thing. What it is is a 1-Up mushroom with a weird palette. But it’s still a video worth linking (11 minutes), and seeing, because to find it you have to learn about an unlikely secret mechanic in Mario 3 involving the map screen and the wandering Hammer Bros. You can watch it, but I’ll give you the gist down below.

Remember those map Hammer Bros. in Mario 3? They walk around after you finish a level or lose a life, adding a bit of extra uncertainty to the map screen, and giving you a stored powerup if you beat them.

But did you ever notice that sometimes the blocks in the battle arena where you fight the Hammer Bros. have powerups in them too, but only sometimes? And it isn’t something to do with the Hammer Bros. themselves, the same fight might have a powerup one time, but no powerup another. What determines whether it’ll be there or not? Is it random?

The diabolical thing is that it turns out the map intersection spaces, the little coin-like locations that Mario/Luigi can stand on but don’t contain levels, Toad Houses or anything that can normally be entered, are actually valid gameplay locations! They’re only loaded as battle arenas when you fight enemies encountered on the map screen on that spot. Although most of those locations look the same on each world, some of them have powerups in a specific block, and some don’t. The qualification for whether you can find it or not is where you fight the Hammer Bros., not which one you fight.

In the sky portion of World 5, there is one specific map screen spot where, if you can lure that area’s lone Hammer Bros. onto it and fight it there, you can find that 1-Up mushroom with the weird palette. It requires a lot of tricky actions to find it, since the Hammer Bros. icon can’t travel up one of the only two ways to that spot, and you also have to avoid clearing a couple of levels using Jugem’s Cloud, because if you clear a level normally, the M or L space that is produced blocks the movement of map screen enemies. You also have to avoid fighting and defeating the Hammer Bros. early of course, and you have to avoid turning the enemy into a Treasure Ship. That might seem like an unlikely thing to have to watch for, but it is a issue encountered in the video. Watch it and you’ll see.

It’s so cryptic and precise that it seems like it must be an intentional secret, the one non-level map screen spot with a 1-Up in it. Given how many infinite life tricks Super Mario Bros. 3 has, I can’t say that it’s particularly useful, but that isn’t the point. It’s a little nod by the developers to the obsessed player, a way of saying, we see what you did there.

rodneylives

Why are these a thing? Retro Game Attic takes a look at the secret Controller Pak menus included in many (all?) memory card supporting games for the Nintendo 64. (14 minutes)

The N64 came out after the release of the Sony Playstation, which had already begun its meteoric rise. The Playstation used optical disc media, and had no on-console memory for saving like the Saturn did, so memory cards were a necessity for saving game state. While the N64 didn’t absolutely need them, since the biggest advantage of cartridges as a game storage medium was the ability to include hardware like flash storage in the cartridge (a feature used in Super Mario 64, the first system pack-in), an iconic feature of the N64 was the controller ports, which allowed the use of flash memory cards that could hold save data for multiple games.

As the video demonstrates, memory cards were plugged directly into the controllers, and controller paks allowed for some nice features. My favorite was how Gauntlet Legends allowed players to save characters to their own memory card, so you could maintain state between games played on different cartridges. (This feature would be retained in the Dreamcast version of Gauntlet Legends, which also had controller port memory cards.)

The Nintendo 64 didn’t have a BIOS or other internal boot time code. Like with the SNES, all of its executable code was contained withing the cartridges, or “Game Paks.” (Nintendo certainly loved to call hardware “Paks.” Pak Chooie Umf!) This meant that controller management features couldn’t be included in the console itself as with the Playstation, and any management would have to be done in the cartridge itself.

I don’t know if it was a Nintendo mandate that all games that used memory cards had to include their own menu to manipulate saved data, but in practice that’s what happened. All those games with their own controller data managers! And many games didn’t even expose them in the menus. I suspect that to this day many former and current Nintendo 64 owners don’t know, if they want to check what data is on a card or delete something, they have to insert a card-supporting game and hold Start while turning the system on.

Not all games! Just games that use memory cards! And the weirdest thing, which the video makes a deal out of, is that every game uses its own assets to implement the menu: graphics, backgrounds, fonts and sounds. Dozens of bespoke UI implementations, all to provide the same functionality. Some games add extra features, like exposing a little extra data or letting you switch between controllers. Some games have separate menus available after their normal startup; Rare did this, and sometimes those used completely different menus. But as far as I know, if a game used memory cards, you could hold Start at boot time to manage them.

It’s just another oddity with what, in retrospect, has become one of Nintendo’s oddest consoles. More information on N64 controller pak management menus can be found at consolemods.org. Information on N64 controller paks themselves is at ultra64.ca, which includes Nintendo’s policies on what cartridges should do to facilitate N64 memory cards.

rodneylives

I could launch immediately into a tirade that people shouldn’t invest self-worth into what amounts to, not just a cartoon character, but a corporate-owned cartoon character.

But I don’t really want to? Despite everything we still don’t have as much female representation in gaming than we should have. The Mario character lineup still skews about 90% male. These are characters that people embody within a game, there should be more girls. (Also, why are three of them princesses?)

Overall this is a pretty silly topic for a non-Sunday post, but I have something unexpectedly great for each of the next two upcoming Sundays, so I wanted to squeeze this in while the squeezing was hot.

WAIT I DIDNT MEAN

rodneylives

MarMax Gaming points out all their locations in this video (10 minutes). There’s not a huge numbers of reasons to get them all, Super Mario World practically throws extra lives at you, but you still might want to know how to find them. Well, this is how. Here:

rodneylives

There’s been explorations into where the cars and NPCs come go, and we posted a video on that topic a while back. Sometimes they end up meandering in loops. Sometimes they leave the roads and just go tearing about the landscape. Sometimes cars actually find parking spaces, leave themselves there, and NPCs pop out and start wandering.

Well, similar questions can be asked about the game’s trains (15m). Mr A-Game on Youtube followed them around for a while to see where they come from. He claims to have discovered “how the train system of Mario Kart World works,” but I’m not sure. There appear to be tracks that trains can travel down either way, meaning, there must be some system in place to prevent train to train collisions. He does uncover some strong tendencies of trains to take particular routes though.

OnADock performed their own investigation that also involved boats. (17m)

If I had to guess, I think trains probably aren’t modeled outside far out of sight of active players, that they’re spawned randomly, and that some checks are performed to make sure two trains won’t share the same track. This is a guess, but it would be in line with the impromptu nature of the auto traffic simulation. It’d also mean that the P-Switch missions that rely on trains being in a specific place won’t be disrupted, and that the train can be left behind in the world after the mission without getting in the way of any grand schedule coordinating the trains.

Well, that’s what I think. Maybe I’m wrong. But… maybe I’m right?

rodneylives

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

About 3½ years ago, when I started doing this blog and Sundry Sundays, I would post a greater variety of thing here.

One thing I delighted in posting were video game-related ratings from web comedy master Lore Sjöberg, whose name I will always treasure from his work on earlyweb humor magazine The Brunching Shuttlecocks, which is sadly offline now.

About a year ago Lore started making web humor again, for a short while anyway, and one of the things he did was four more installments of The Ratings, one of the most popular features of old Brunching, once so popular that he collected many of them into a book. He even did a few video ratings during the time he 𝙼𝙰𝙳𝙴 𝙲𝙾𝙽𝚃𝙴𝙽𝚃 for Wired Magazine. I once linked to his ratings of Legend of Zelda weapons, which is still as funny as when he recorded it 17 years ago.

Well, about a year ago, during the brief revival of teh raitngs at badgods.com, he rated a few 1st Generation Pokemon, and what do you know, he’s still got it. An example:

HITMONCHAN

I’m deeply disappointed Niantic didn’t continue with the Hitmonchan/Hitmonlee naming scheme. That could have given us Hitmonsegal, Hitmonyeoh, and Hitmonvandamme.

If you enjoy it, or have ever enjoyed Lore’s work through the years, you can currently find him on Bluesky. Now that there’s not a thriving ecosystem of blogs to link to his work, he’s kind of hard to find now. Help the algorithm realize he’s a treasure, and go have a look!

The Ratings: First Generation Pokemon (badgods.com)

ALSO, I just found out, AGDQ 2026, the week-long charity speedrunning marathon, begins today at Noon Eastern Time! Right off the bat it starts with Super Mario Sunshine and Jet Set Radio, and around 11:30 that night will be running the new Katamari game, Once Upon A Katamari! And from there there’s more great runs to watch, with the typically-hilarious Awful Block this year taking place midnight to sunrise Thursday morning. Here’s the full schedule.

rodneylives

Here is this year’s post, but you don’t have to follow it because I’ve included the links in this post too.

They’re all videos this year. These first links are to videos by Skawo:

In Minish Cap, there are certain names you can’t put on your save file due to a checksum bug. (11 minutes) The same bug can result in a valid save file being declared corrupted:

I think I mentioned this one before, but again, in Ocarina of Time, if you go back the way you came during the event in Kakariko Village, the world will become a glitchy mess (7 minutes):

In early versions of Ocarina, holding down R while talking to King Zora when he gives you the Blue Tunic causes him to give you a different item instead (14 minutes):

Also in Ocarina of Time, in some areas there’s a mysterious square in the upper-left corner of the screen (6 minutes):

When fighting pairs of Stalfos enemies, the game starts to lag heavily when you defeat one of the two, before the other one is beaten (9 minutes):

Capsyst Animations made three fake commercials for early Zelda games, in the style of the evocative illustrations from the manual. There’s the original Zelda, Zelda II and Link to the Past (all 1 minute long):

And, finally, here are two strange commercials for the Zelda 1 on NES, the Zelda Rap, and whatever this is supposed to be (both ½ minutes):

rodneylives

I maintain that I am not a Nintendo Adult. But they have had a long history of making inventive and interesting games. I thought they’d been failing a bit at that lately, but then comes Kirby Air Riders, as weird and distinctive game as they’ve ever published. (By the way, did you know that they’ve put up Christmas decorations on the Kirby Air Riders menu screen and paddock area?)

The holidays tend to be a time of distraction for me, so let’s just gawk at some animated Nintendo commercials from across the years. (26 minutes)

rodneylives

Many of these games had weird differences from Nintendo’s originals. The best known of them is probably Super Mario Bros. Special, a very weird version with paged scrolling, which is to say, no scrolling at all, but just flipping forward one screen at a time. Super Mario Bros. Special isn’t on the subject page of this post, which is old enough that it’s only available on the Wayback Machine, but it is on the website World Of Stewart, and wonder of wonders that page is available on the living internet! Playthroughs of the whole game, in its clunky miscolored XOR-sprite glory, can also be seen on Youtube, here, for instance. (51 minutes)

There was also Punch Ball Mario Bros., which took the basic premise of Mario Bros. and just, well threw it away, just tossed it right in the trash, and replaced it with punching a ball around to attack enemies. Gameplay of that is also on Youtube. (5½ minutes)

Another version of Mario Bros., Mario Bros. Special (which isn’t Super Mario Bros. Special but something else) It’s harder to find Youtube video of that because Google assumes you must be looking for the Super version, but it can be found. (8½ minutes) If you recognize the title screen music from that then you are really a supergeek! (I did recognize it, so yes, that includes me.) And the game, wow… it really doesn’t look fun to play.

Some other games listed include Excitebike (11 minute video), Ice Climber (7½ minute video), the (only slightly Nintendo and with janky music) HAL Hole-In-One Golf (15 minute video), and (the very non-Nintendo) Chack’n Pop (4 minute video). Hole-In-One is a predecessor of Nintendo’s Golf, if you’re looking for that Nintendo connection.

One thing all of these games, except maybe Hole-In-One, have in common is they look like they’re excruciating to play now! They either have way too fast or slow controls, or ear-tearing scratchy music, or both. But they are interesting as curiosities, so here they are. Curious!

Strange and Wonderful NEC PC-8801 Games (Wayback Machine)

rodneylives

I didn’t know that Nintendo’s first foray into consoles was making a custom controller for the Odyssey (not the Odyssey 2, the Odyssey), and distributed it in Japan. But I do know that Nintendo’s history extends far back before video games, to making Hanafuda and traditional playing cards, and still makes them to this day, along with Mah Jong, Shogi and Go equipment.

rodneylives

City Trial remains the main draw, even when I have a bad game it’s still fun. You start, you build up stats over five minutes, then you get a “stadium” (which you can usually pick from now) that tests your build.

Throughout the five minutes all manner of things happen: bosses attack, minigames happen, blanket advantages or disadvantages happen to everyone. It’s chaos, but it’s FUN chaos. Sometimes it feels like you win without trying; sometimes you lose despite everything. Every game is like a little story. But good or bad, it’s over quickly, and you can do it again.

Each run has a selection of special things that can happen during it. One of them is a hunt for pieces of a “legendary machine,” a vehicle with extremely high stats that is sometimes hidden in some boxes. If a player collects one, an icon appears over them during play, signifying to everyone else that they have it. If player with a machine piece is struck by another player they might drop it. If a player gets all three pieces, a notification is given to all the players, and they get to ride it. It happened to me once! Here is video (½ minute):

Other things can happen too! It’s really never the same game twice.

Now, the worst thing about the original Air Ride still applies: there is no Grand Prix mode. (Why not?? I guess the inhabitants of Dream Land don’t have it in them to hold one?)

The most pleasant surprise, besides the fleshed-out, fully online-capable City Trial mode, which feels like the game it was always meant to be, is that Top Ride, the odd mode out of the original, is now decently playable and much more fun. It doesn’t have a Grand Prix mode either, but its races are so short that it barely even matters. I’ve mentioned before that it feels like Sakurai intentionally patterned it after Atari’s ancient Sprint games, which go all the way back to 1974’s Gran Track 10, giving it a legacy that goes back to two years after Pong. It’s playable online too, as well as namesake mode Air Ride.

The new singleplayer mode, Road Trip, is okay, but it’s just a disjointed series of challenges. You do get to build up stats throughout it, giving it an RPG feel, But there’s no exploration or anything like that.

The one thing that connects all the separate modes is Kirby Air Ride’s greatest invention, returning for another go: the Checklist. A grid of 150 boxes, one per mode, with an extra one for Online play. Every one has an unlock requirement.

At first, none of the boxes’ requirements are even revealed. You’re certain to check at least one of them the first time you play each mode though, purely by chance, and the requirements for the boxes around the ones you’ve checked off are revealed to you. Most of the boxes give you a little something when you check them. Some new decals or accessories to decorate your vehicles with. Some of them unlock characters, or machines for use in some modes, or costume pieces. A scant few give you free checks you can spend, to mark off difficult challenges for free. Many (not all) have optional setups you can activate, like little minigames.

Kirby Air Riders’ biggest sin, and greatest virtue, is that it’s really different from other games. It throws out features one would have thought obvious. (Grand Prix modes!) It adds weird new ones for no reason other than the joy of doing so. (Playing with gummis in a physics engine! Customizing machines and selling them in a little fake marketplace!)

And it does unexpected things, like after spending five minutes attacking and avoiding up to 15 other players, having them each choose which Stadium to play in. There isn’t an overall winner: each Stadium has its own winner! And, if you’re the only one to choose a Stadium, you win automatically.

This happens much more rarely than you might assume: it’s only happened to me once, after playing a whole lot of City Trial. Even those rare times were the game randomly decides you’re all playing THIS now, players are still split up into arbitrary groups.

It’s hard to say if you’ll like it because other than Air Ride, there’s nothing really to compare it too. It’s its own thing, but I think that’s what I like most about it. Whatever Kirby Air Riders has, this is the only place to get it. And it definitely has something. It’s a shame that you have to take a seventy dollar gamble on whether it’s something you want. Ideally the Global Test Rides were when one would have tried it out and seen if it was to one’s liking. Maybe they’ll do another one some day, or you can watch Youtube videos of gameplay? (I once again humbly offer my own.) But if this is something you’ll like, you’ll really like it. Maybe use that new Switch “game borrowing” feature to bum it off a friend for a while. It should be experienced at least once.

rodneylives

I made a list of everything on my Nintendo Switch account: <b><u><i>two hundred and seventy-one items</i></u></b></ironicfakehtmltag>. Some day I’ll give you the list, but not today. But I figured it’d be useful to people if I reported on some notable deals happening on the eShop from time to time. Nintendo doesn’t pay me to do this, and any links you use earn me nothing, it isn’t advertising. And only items that catch my eye, and survive the crushing wave of ennui these tasks produce, make it into this list.

Note 1: I round off most prices. I count every keypress dearly, and typing “.99” over and over again pours caustic soda on my remaining nerve endings.

Note 2: I use em-dashes in this. That is not proof I am some idiotic LLM, you adjective[entire] derisive noun[breadbin].

Note 3: A foundational requirement for being included in this list is it must be at least half off.

Note 4: No screenshots or covers this time. I’ve just been up all night tracking down Japanese words in the Super Famicom version of Shiren the Wanderer, my neurons are floating in a thick soup right now.

Ahem:

General

The Wonderful 101 Remastered ($18, 55% off) — One of the most beloved games for the Wii-U, and contains a superhero character called Wonder Toilet, I say approvingly.

Dokapon: Sword of Fury ($12.50, 50%) — new entry in the cult JRPG-styled board-and-party game series.

SteamWorld Heist II & Build Bundle ($18, 60% off) and SteamWorld Build & Dig Bundle ($14, 60% off)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed ($16, 60% off)

Save Me Mr Tako: Definitive Edition ($3, 80% off): A rerelease of another Switch game that, I hear, was sabotaged by its original publisher. A challenging-yet-cartoony pixel art platformer with Game Boy graphics about an octopus hero, with a more involved story than you might expect. It’s three bucks, what have you got to lose?

Capcom

Resident Evil 4 ($10, 50% off) — The entry on the site spells “Resident Evil” all in lowercase for some stupid marketing reason. It’s widely acknowledge that this port of a Gamecube title is a high-point in the series, and contains zero percent zombies by weight. A lot of Resident Evil games seem to be on sale right now in fact, along with the Monster Hunter series, but I’ll leave those for you to seek out if you want them.

Street Fighter 6 (Switch 2 version, $20, 50% off) — After a dalliance with SoulCalibur back on the Dreamcast, and a ridiculous amount of time spent training amiibo fighters in Smash Ultimate, I’ve largely stayed away from fighting games. Still, it’s nice to see a classic series survive.

Devil May Cry, Devil May Cry 2, Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition (all individually $10, 50% off) — I never got into these, finding them a bit too preposterous, but I understand a lot of people like them, and hey, they’re here.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy ($10, 66% off) & Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy ($25, 50% off) — Why is Apollo Justice more expensive than Nick’s games? I don’t know, but it’s a good reason to get it now before its price shoots back up.

Atari

AKKA ARRH ($6, 70% off): To think AKKA ARRH finally saw commercial release decades after the old Atari passed on producing its prototype, and this version was developed by Jeff Minter himself. But how do you pronounce it? Like a pirate? ARRRRRH.

In fact, a lot of Atari games are on discount right now, including multiple titles in its Recharged series of updated arcade remakes. A few others: Head Over Heels ($2, 80% off), Asteroids Recharged ($3, 80% off), Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration ($18, 55% off), Atari Flashback Classics ($12, 70% off), Atari Mania ($6.24, 75% off) and Centipede Recharged ($3, 70% off), among many others.

SquareEnix

A lot of SquareEnix games are on sale at the moment. Collection of Mana ($16, 60% off) — Three games, Final Fantasy Legend (Game Boy), the beloved Secret of Mana (SNES) and the heretofore unreleased-in-English Seiken Densetsu III, now christened Trials of Mana. Sadly Trials, unlike Secret, doesn’t support three human players, not even in its original version, but it does offer a lot of replay value with multiple scenarios to complete.

A while bunch of Final Fantasy games are currently on sale, too many to link them all. VII is $6.39 (60% off); IX is $8.39 (also 60% off). On the Enix side of the building, Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age ($20, 50% off) is interesting. There’s also four Kingdom Hearts games with typically silly names, like HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX ($16, 60% off), but be careful, many of them are cloud versions that won’t work without an internet connection. There’s also Octopath Traveler and its sequel (both $24, 60% off) and Romancing SaGa 2 ($7.50, 70% off), among others.

rodneylives

Sadly the video has been made non-embedable, so it’s up to you to follow the link, if you care. The video encapsulates information on donkeykongforum.net (which it mislinks). That link is some hardcore geekery, of the kind beloved to Set Side B’s cadre of pixelated aliens, so please take a look.

Here’s the basics, in text form. Donkey Kong gets more difficult over the course of five “levels.” These are different from “boards,” a.k.a. “racks” or “screens.” In the corner of the screen there’s a notice, “L=X” where X is some number. That’s the Level. It goes up by one every time you finish a Rivets board.

The problem is, starting with Level 2, the spots at which the springs hit the ground is slightly randomized. The final climb up to Pauline’s platform is super dangerous, since Mario is vulnerable the whole way. Level 4 is the hardest difficulty for the springs on Elevators, and you have to handle it a very specific way: climb up to the first safe spot, wait for a spring that comes out bouncing at a specific location (near DK’s right foot) then running to another safe spot, then waiting for another specific spring speed to rush over and up the ladder.

So go forth and conquer the elevators, and as Coily the Sprite reminds us:

rodneylives

Here is the Direct itself (1 hour 2 minues):

I overall really like the direction the news of Kirby Air Riders is going, even if I have a few mixed feelings about it. There’s a lot of cool and funny new elements, but it also feels like Sakurai might be leaning a bit too hard into the Smash Bros. style. So many of the new features are note-for-note similar to Super Smash Bros, which I can’t just abbreviate to “SSB,” because that’s the same initials as this blog.

Like the fully-voiced opening theme song. The feature of Smash Ultimate that I hated more than perhaps any other part was that stupid theme song. It’s not that it’s a bad song itself, but every time I started the game up I was greeted by a song about the most overused tropes, not just in gaming, but in current-day media altogether: light and darkness. Oh, if my griping might start a movement to take pop culture back from terrible good-slash-evil narratives I would be a pleased whatever-it-is-that-I-am. I got the Adventure Mode out of the way very early in my time with Ultimate, I didn’t need to be reminded it existed at every startup. Air Riders has one of these songs too. I’m sure it’s nicely sung and produced, but it’s the opposite of what makes Kirby music great: bright, cheery, impressively scored tunes with an incredibly quick tempo.

Other features in both games:

• For starters, the interface, especially the menus, are extremely Smash-like.
• Amiibo support, in the sense that both games store machine learning parameters onto the figure’s 2K of flash memory to support trainable characters. Yes, figure players are back, the feature only interesting to me and a handful of others. I wonder how the game will utilize the approximately ½K of flash storage available to game applications this time?
• Uses a currency for unlocks, and a weird kind of fake economy. Smash Ultimate has gold and “SP.” Air Riders has “Miles,” which are essentially gold coins again. Is anyone annoyed that gold, a metal without a lot of industrial use, is still absurdly valuable mostly because of jewelry use and tradition?
• A very similar visual style. When unlocks happen, words splash across the screen in your face in exactly the same way familiar to anyone who followed the Smash Ultimate updates eight years ago.
• Sakurai says it’s different, but “Global Win Power” still looks a whole lot like “Global Smash Power.”
• On top of it all it uses the Smash Announcer, who unless my ear is mistaken (it frequently is) has been with the series since Melee, at least in English.

Not that the requisite griping is over, there’s lots of really fun things unveiled too. Like the inclusion of loads more Kirby characters, some of them pretty deep cuts. My favorites have to be Lololo and Lalala, who are direct references to HAL Laboratory’s early MSX hit Eggerland, known in the US as The Adventures of Lolo. Other than an obscure Windows release many years ago now, Lolo and Lala basically live on Planet Popstar these days, with no forwarding address left to the King of Eggerland.

Í’m struck by the fact that, by having so many varied villains who all have become Kirby’s friends over the years, Kirby’s adorable little universe has become one of the largest and deepest in all of gaming. Among Kirby’s friends are a mischievous penguin, a mysterious knight with a battleship, a lady robot entrepreneur, a mouse thief, a spacefairing alien, a spider person, a tricky clown, and more. Most of these characters were created after Sakurai left HAL and Nintendo, but yet are fully embraced by Air Riders, and I love that.

And there are so many weird little unnecessary touches. There’s a full lobby-like “paddock” where characters can congregate between matches, and they gave everyone full walking and jumping animations just for interacting within it. Sakurai says it took a lot of effort to make them, and I believe him. Also, it seems to be fully catered. Chef Kawasaki’s been busy, I see.

The best reveal was the new game mode, Road Trip. I’ve always liked Smash Bros’ weird side game modes, like Smash Run and Smash Board. There’s no one working in big gamedev who is as free with his thinking and design atoms as Masahiro Sakurai. He takes all these design elements and combines them in a way to create these little narrative engines. Road Trip fills the biggest gap of the original Kirby Air Ride, a game that, despite the greatness of City Trial, had absolutely no Story or Grand Prix mode, and so seemed a bit light. And indeed, there’s still no Grand Prix, or other structured racing-only mode.

Back to Road Trip, I especially like that it uses the patches from City Trial, so as you play you also create customized vehicles.

All of the tracks from Air Ride are returning in Air Riders, although it seems the original City Trial City isn’t. Also returning is Top Ride, Sakurai’s weird homage to, of all things, Atari’s incredibly ancient Sprint series. He’s never mentioned Sprint in a Direct, but it’s so obviously a riff on Sprint. Even if he’s never heard of Sprint (given the breadth of his knowledge of the history of video games that seems really unlikely), it had to have been inspired by other games that were inspired by Sprint.

Another of Air Ride’s signature features, the Checklist, is back. To explain: each game mode has a grid of boxes, each with some feat or objective to perform. While you can unlock them in any order, you aren’t told what any of them are at first. But after you stumble upon your first unlock, the conditions of the squares surrounding that one are revealed to you, so it results in a kind of progression. Some of the squares unlock features when opened, and as you clear the board you’re eventually granted a handful of free checkmarks, to help clear out the hardest challenges.

In Air Ride, the Checklist was the only thing providing continuity between play sessions. That’s less the case with all the things there are to unlock in Air Riders, but what with Nintendo’s stubborn resistance to implementing Achievement features, as about the nearest thing to that Nintendo’s ever published, they’re welcome.

Here’s a flurry of little things I noticed:

• A bespoke boss, a mecha version of our favorite emperor penguin*, called Robo Dedede. Say it quickly, it’s fun!
• A special kind of collectable called gummis. They seem to have no purpose except to pile up onscreen in a physics engine and letting the player sift through them like a greedy candy miser.
• A transforming vehicle, that transforms like a Transformer, metal bits shifting around into an alternate shape.
• For the first time in any Kirby game, you can be nice to Whispy Woods, instead of making the old tree cry.
• Some fun cameo characters revealed: Tortilding (from Forgotten Land), King Golem (from Amazing Mirror) and Computer Virus (Super Star), the funniest Kirby boss of all, where you fought it in a mocked-up JRPG-style battle.
• A track only named “?” in the Direct, which uses music from the Nightmare fight from Kirby’s Adventure (the first “serious” opponent the pink blob creature ever fought), and features the Heart of Nova in the background.
• For the first time really in a Nintendo game, it looks like they paid serious attention to accessibility! You can turn off screen-shake and move the camera so that motion isn’t so extreme. As time has passed I find myself more and more bothered by screen-shaking effects, though I’m not sure if that’s me, or just that they’re much more common nowadays than they were in the days of the NES.
• Once of the license designs shown off uses iconography from the Japan-only Kirby Cafés.

* I think the official line is that King Dedede is some kind of eagle, but he’s never shown any hint of flying like a real bird, and the idea of Kirby’s first major antagonist being a penguin with royal pretensions is too much fun to reject.

rodneylives

In her 11-minute video, the reviews, not all the games, but the ones most worthy of calling out as good, or meh, experiences, with enough detail to be able to figure out if your opinion just might differ. Given that tickets are limited, available mostly via drawing, and you can only even use cards that use a “3D Secure authentication service,” bleh, it’s really good to know what to focus on before you arrive at your date-and-time-limited ticket appointment.

The video’s title says it’s a review of “(almost)” every game there, but it doesn’t say which games she didn’t review. No explanation is given as to why.

The games she covers:

• Shigureden, a card-matching game that hearkens back to Nintendo’s roots as a playing card company
• Game & Watch games playable via your shadow, Manhole and Ball
• Ultra Hand (an extendable arm toy originally designed by Gunpei Yokoi) demonstration and play, pretty cheap at one coin
• Ultra Machine (a mechanical wiffle-ball batting pitcher also designed by Yokoi), another physical toy, allowing you to wreak playful havoc by allowing you to hit balls towards objects in a simulated living room, some of them would be breakable in real life; seems like Nintendo is poking fun at the destructiveness of their own past products; also cheap at two coins, and there’s even different rooms to play in
• Big Controller is just playing emulations of various Nintendo games using a gigantic controller (she presumably makes an error by saying one of them is a Playstation controller, but I haven’t been so maybe she’s right), they require two people to operate and if you’re alone they may (or may not?) supply a staffer to play with you
• Love Tester, a device to test your fake compatibility with another person, and another Yokoi invention, but this is more of a number of games designed around the idea of the thing
• Retro Arcade’s review says you can play “NES, SNES or Playstation games,” which also seems like a fairly big error (maybe she meant to say N64?), but this is just playing Nintendo products, and via emulation too, which she points out
• Zapper and Scope is a large-scale multiplayer co-op light gun game; unlike Ultra Machine you aim at a screen instead of physical objects; this is the most expensive game at four coins, but also short
• Hanafuda, the classic Japanese card game, also a reference to Nintendo’s past; intrinsically two-player and best played if you brought a friend, though an employee will play if you’re sad and alone; BTW, if you want to try this without visiting the museum in Japan, the DS version of Clubhouse Games has Hanafuda included as one of its many traditional games, and will even tell you the rules, supply a computer opponent for you, and not tell you which card to play.

rodneylives

Rob O’Hara on basic strategy (9½ minutes). Note that he’s playing on one of those multi-machine emulators so the sounds are a little off.

arcadeimpossible talks with former world record holder Hank Chen (22 minutes):

Getting deeper into the weeds now. Here’s a high-level strategy video on just the Barrel (a.k.a. Girders) boards (41 minutes!). All the following videos are from Chambers_N Gaming:

Was that a lot to say on this one subject? Well hold on, that was just part 1! Here’s part 2, which is another 42 minutes!

And here’s detailed strategy on the Rivets (a.k.a. Ziggurat) boards, although it’s “only” 19 minutes:

That a single game can inspire so much discussion so long after its release speaks volumes about the quality of its design. A lot of it has to do with how much randomness is in the game. Even the best players die sometimes! Donkey Kong is heavily resistant to rote patterns, although there’s still things the player can do to subtly affect each board, and make it more manageable. On the Barrels boards, on higher levels, you can affect when barrels decide to come down ladders by steering towards them as they reach their decision point.

rodneylives

Many of these videos are very long, and sometimes multipart besides. This video, a speedrun guide for Super Mario World from VG101, is not. (18 minutes)

Of course Super Mario World is a game that’s been destroyed by speedrunning. If you set aside scripted, tool-assisted speedruns (TASes), which I usually do nowadays, there are people who have still taken advantage of glitches to warp directly to the credits from gameplay, and perform much weirder tricks besides. This video doesn’t rely on those: it’s just the most direct route from start to finish through its levels, as God and Tezuka intended.

rodneylives

But there’s one source of extra lives that few know about, or at least, I didn’t know about it. There are invisible triggers in some levels that, if you cross over their activation points in order, will generate a single 1up Mushroom. Looygi Bros shows off all 15 of these spots in the game here (8 minutes):

Why Nintendo decided to include these spots in a game where players will usually be walking around with double-digit life counts, I couldn’t tell you. Super Mario World is one of those Mario games where it doesn’t save progress after every level, so running out of lives is a real setback. But they could have just designed it so that it saved more often? I guess they just saw that it’s fun to earn lots of extra lives.

rodneylives

The process is to boot the Gamecube and Gameboy Player with the GBA plugged into it with the cable. Then turn off the Gamecube leaving the Gameboy Advance on, disconnect the GBA cable from the GC, then plug it into the Gamecube adapter plugged into a USB port connected to the Switch. If the GBA is still powered on, it should be usable as a Switch controller at that point, until it’s turned off!

If you don’t have them all that kit, a modded GC or Wii will also suffice for the Gameboy Player. It’s all demonstrated in NotRealEric’s video. There is also some alternate hardware usable, including third-party adapters and connectors. The video is ten minutes long, but the setup is in the first 3½ minutes of it; the rest is demonstrating some use cases, including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

The hardest to find of these devices now, if you don’t use modded hardware, is the Gameboy Player, which is quite expensive used. But if you do happen to have all the pieces, it’s quite the hack. It seems to work due to a controller-emulation program the Gameboy Player (or modded GB or Wii running mGBA) sends to the GBA, which, amazingly, is Switch compatible.

Maybe you have a magic combination of gizmos lying around to use this trick, and use a GBA as an extremely limited Switch peripheral? Yeah, let’s not kid ourselves, this is pretty silly and doesn’t have a strong use case, considering that Switches come with two Joycons, but it’s amazing that it works at all.

rodneylives

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?

rodneylives

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.

rodneylives

Masahiro Sakurai is an odd duck. Famously the creator of both Kirby and Super Smash Bros., the last game he made as an employee of HAL Laboratory and/or Nintendo was Kirby Air Ride, or KAR. We’ve posted about KAR four times before: in general, the effects of its vehicle stat patches, the online competitive KAR scene and Sakurai’s own commentary about it. This time makes five, and it’s safe to say it won’t be the last.

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.

rodneylives

The biggest surprise is, at the end, the news that both Caves of Qud and UFO 50 are coming to the Switch platforms at last! UFO 50 is out now! Please forgive my breach of decorum when I say, yippie, and besides that, wahoo. Thank you. (sips tea)

rodneylives

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

From TerminalMontage, who’s shown up here multiple times before. I thought maybe I might have already posted this, but a quick search seems to indicate that I haven’t, and it’s a useful intersection between Nintendo things, roguelike things, and silly things.

Specifically, this Something (5½ minutes) is About the original releases of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Rescue Team, Red and Blue. And you’ll probably best see what all the About is about if you’ve played the original.

I’ll throw in some notes about the references in this video:

• The rescue mechanic, which involves teleporting rescued Pokemon. How the hell does it work?
• Kecleons, the shopkeepers in PMD, are as scary as depicted here. To think that this would be a lasting legacy of the Nethack Devteam’s Izchak Miller.
• The music in the volcano segment is from the game, and it does the thing that the kids these days call “slaps.”
• Make sure to fast forward through the credits for a final closing gag, where we find out who Cyndaquil really is.

rodneylives

#18: Spread rumors that the Switch 2 requires a new, more costly form of electricity to use.

#23: Dress in a robe, ask others in line if they’ve accepted Mario as their lord and savior. Also, they cannot set up a shrine to their Wario Amiibo.

#26: Show off the SD Micro Express card they bought online, telling people “If you don’t have one of these, you’re already dead.”

#28: Swear people to secrecy, tell them they’re a spy working for Sony, then take pictures of people in line to send to “headquarters.”

#32: Bring a blue bowl with spikes glued to the underside, then throw it at the person at the front of the line and try to take their place.

To explain: Lists of things Private Skippy is not allowed to do (usually in the U.S. Army, but also other armed forces or even other places) are an ancient form of internet humor, possibly older than the World Wide Web itself. It’s the kind of thing that would have been traded around Usenet, or even Fidonet. (Its absence from Know Your Meme proves its affected by recency bias.) TV Tropes has a page on Skippy, a claim it originated in 2001—I think it’s older but could easily be wrong—and a link to the webpage skippyslist.com, which is a broken WordPress install. Sorry Skippy.

Here is one surviving list on the Web, although part of the process of Skippy is that people add new items as they pass it around, so there is no canonical list. I should warn you that, as a very old form of internet humor, you can expect these lists to have questionable items on them, depending on who’s posting it. The list I linked also prefaces the list with a backstory. It’s entirely unnecessary: many of us know a Pvt. Skippy of some variety, even if they never served.

rodneylives

The point is, Mario Paint was also pretty unsuited to its hardware. I mentioned recently the fact that the cartridge doesn’t actually have enough memory to save all of its data and tries to use data compression to make everything fit, which, due to the nature of compression, doesn’t always work. Also, Mario Paint came with the SNES mouse which it requires, packed in, raising its price and increasing it even more in the aftermarket. And, worst of all: you can only save one image to the cart at a time, and the official supported way to preserve your work, as the Brothers Chaps did with the Homestar Runner link above, is to record it using a VCR.

This sounds like the kind of thing the hacking community could solve, but a rapid Google search (I’m running out of time in making this post) doesn’t turn up anything, even though I’m sure this exists somewhere. Someone on hackaday.io says they’re working on a physical device that could rescue the image off of a Mario Paint cartridge, and would even have an LCD screen built into it so you could see a cart’s image saved onto it, which I’m sure would have blown a young Mark and Matt Chapman’s minds long ago. But the last update was in 2023.

Going the other way, putting outside images onto a Mario Paint save, is not only possible but there’s a tool to do it automatically, hosted, awesomely, on Neocities.

There’s speculation that Nintendo themselves might do something with Mario Paint and the Switch Online service on the Switch 2. The Joycons on that system can be used as mice! But given the direction Nintendo’s been going with Sw2 (“switwo”) it’d probably be a paid feature, and nothing’s even been hinted at yet so who the hell knows. But imagine support for exporting Mario Paint images to your SD card, or onto your smartphone?

rodneylives