Tag: nintendo

Nintendo Indie World Announced Games

In the style of huge corporations in the year 2022, Nintendo has announced a slate of upcoming indie games in the form of a video instead of a sensible text page. It fell to The Escapist to give us a nice text-form rundown of their impending offerings.

In the spirit of reducing things even further, the games on tap, with each game’s segment cued up for easy perusal, are:

  • Ooblets, from Glumberland, aggressively cute farming/monster sim.
  • Batora: Lost Haven, from Team17 and Stormind Games, sci-fi narrative action-RPG.
  • ElecHead, from Nama Takahashi, pixel-art puzzle/platformer that he started working on as a student, and started life as a game jam project.
  • Soundfall, from Drastic Games and Noodlecake, co-op rhythm action combat game. (Released today!)
  • Wildfrost, from Chucklefish and Deadpan Games, a “tactical roguelike deckbuilder.” (We have our own opinions as to what roguelike means.)
  • Totally Accurate Battle Simulator, from Landfall Games, a humorous physics-based combat simulation sandbox that first made waves on Steam.
  • Gunbrella, from doinksoft and Devolver Digital, a Wild West-themed “noir-pink” pixel-art Metroidvania. Not available until next year, though.
  • We Are OFK, from Team OFK, a episodic “indiepop music biopic” game (a lot of scare quotes this post, I admit) based on a band.
  • Silt, from Fireshine and Spiral Circus Games, an aquatic puzzle/exploration game with a monochrome silhouette aesthetic.
  • Mini Motorways, from Dinosaur Polo Club! A sequel to Mini Metro, I did a Q&A with its developers over at Game Developer! (For some reason it’s attributed to “staff,” but I assure you I wrote the questions for it.) It’s a strategy simulation game about laying out roads. (Released today!)
  • Wayward Strand, from ghost pattern, a narrative adventure game set in 1970s Australia with a time management element.
  • Cult of the Lamb, from Devolver Digital and Massive Monster, a cute procedurally-generated town-building game with action elements and dungeon exploration.
  • Another Crab’s Treasure, from Aggro Crab, which actively calls itself a “Souls-like” in its trailer, an action combat game about a hermit crab out on a quest. Hermit crabs find shells and other objects to serve as their home in real life, and this game incorporates that fact into the gameplay. Not out until next year, though.

At the end, there were a few short clips of other upcoming games: One Shot: World Machine Edition, Gibbon: Beyond the Trees (releases today), Idol Manager, Card Shark, Cursed to Golf, A Guidebook of Babel, and OPUS: Echo of Starsong: Full Bloom Edition.

Last-minute addition, here are Kyle and Krista, formerly of the Nintendo Minute and now with their own thang going on, reacting to the games:

Link Roundup 5/8/2022

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

This is a big one! Kat Bailey reporting for IGN and doing some quality journalism, looking into Nintendo of America’s problem with leaning on contract employees. Nintendo has enjoyed something of a reputation as a good place to work, but it definitely seems like this has changed. The article is long but a must-read!

M. Smith of Engadget previews Steam on Chromebooks.

Graham Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun talks to Ron Gilbert about the in-development and eagerly-anticipated Return to Monkey Island.

From Sean Endicott of Windows Central, Microsoft open sources Windows 3D Movie Maker! Here’s the announcement tweet. Seems Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman was convinced to do so by hardware hacker and source of general awesomeness foone!

Christian Donlan at Eurogamer looks back at the Crystal Dynamics’ take on the Tomb Raider series. That would be the Tomb Raider games subtitled Legend, Anniversary, and Underworld.

And a marketing success story, zukalous at How To Market A Game (title’s to the point) describes how the pachinko roguelite Peglin managed to get popular so quickly! It also links to friend-of-the-blog Simon Carless’ game discovery newsletter!

Music From Kirby Cafe

In the past for limited times Nintendo has authorized the setting up of Kirby Cafes, charming little representations of the affable pink blob’s world and its inhabitants. Two of them are currently open, in Tokyo and Hakata, Japan. These have really gone the extra mile to create an atmosphere of Kirbiness, from their menus to having large plush Waddle Dees to set into a chair opposite yours if you should come to one alone.

I like the use of the older style of Kirby face on this hamburger.

The embedded video is over an hour and a half of background music from these cafes. It appears to be a rip of a pair of official CDs. SiliconEra reports on some current dishes being served there as tie-ins to the new 3D Kirby game for Switch, Kirby and the Forgotten Land. The cafes have an official website and Twitter feed.

“Here are your Kirburgers, and your side orders of Kirbyfries.”
(inhaling noise)

Commodore Basic 2.0 for Other Systems

Say what you will about Commodore BASIC 2.0, the built-in programming language and makeshift shell for the Commodore 64, written by Microsoft employees and descending from code written by Bill Gates himself, it’s certainly, um, basic. Nearly everything that takes advantage of that machine’s graphics or sound features involves POKEing values into memory at various locations, requiring a programmer to memorize a long list of important numbers.

Because it doesn’t interface with the system’s unique features to any great extent, it’s a very generic version of BASIC. But this means it can be ported to other systems without tremendous effort. Fancy-pants commands don’t have to be converted to another architecture’s norms, because there aren’t any! And lots of systems used the instruction set and general capabilities of the MOS 6502, upon which the Commodore 64 is based, so now we have versions of its BASIC that work on the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Atari 800. They’re both based off of Project 64, an annotated disassembly of the C64’s BASIC and Kernal ROM code.

The NES port should be able to run on actual hardware, but you’ll need the Family Keyboard that was made to work with the Famicom’s own official BASIC to use it, which was only released in Japan.

By the way, the reason that I write BASIC in all-caps is, it’s an acronym! It stands for Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

Gaming Hell: For The Frog The Bell Tolls

It’s awesome when a tile-based game uses huge letters like this.

Gaming Hell is great! It’s an obscure game investigation site with some serious Oldweb power. They recently had a look at the Japanese-only Game Boy title For The Frog The Bell Tolls, known in its home territory as Kaeru No Tame Ni Kane Wa Naru, the game whose engine went on to serve as the basis for Link’s Awakening. (EDIT: As the article points out and I skipped over, and discovered after I wrote the preceding, while Kaeru no Tame Ni Kane Wa Naru has a number of aesthetic and gameplay similarities to Link’s Awakening, under the hood people note that the engine does not seem to be similar!)

There is a whole world of Nintendo games that never made it out of their home country on release, and the company only acknowledges exist in other territories with reluctance. Games like Captain Rainbow, Doshin the Giant, and Nazo No Murasame Jo. Once in while one might get a Virtual Console release, or a mention in a Smash Bros. or Nintendo Land, but other that it seems like strict radio silence.

Ant Cooke of Gaming Hell speculates on why this game didn’t make it to the US, that it has to do with some difficult to localize content. There may be something to this, but if I might offer? Kaeru No Tame Ni Kane Wa Naru also only got one rerelease in Japan. Maybe Nintendo saw its not featuring one of their large stable of marketable characters as a weak point? Likely it’s a combination of many factors that edged the game over into possibly-unprofitable territory on some obscure spreadsheet, somewhere.

(Source) We in the US never get cool box art like this.

One could spend hours speculating on why Nintendo does or doesn’t do a thing. Ultimately they are a huge company, not a monolith but composed of hundreds of people, and many people could doom a project if they chose. It is a shame in For The Frog The Bell Toll’s case. It’s not just their loss, but all of ours.

The New Yorker: Mario at 40

In addition to the ZX Spectrum, Nintendo mascot Mario, née Jumpman, also turns 40 this year.

I’ve actually seen people claim that Mario is the perfect mascot, like he were destined towards super-stardom. He was nothing of the sort! Only a vaguely ethnic stereotype at first, although purposely a bit ugly in his original incarnation, he’s a working-class kind of guy. It seems prescient now, but it was the 80s at the time of his creation. Who picks a carpenter (his original occupation) to be their hero? Shigeru Miyamoto does. That’s really the secret of Mario’s success: he was created by one of the most successful game designers of all time, as part of his first project.

The New Yorker, which, it’s a fact, publishes humor other than cartoons, has a pretty funny bit of short fiction in tribute to Nintendo’s plumber and his advancing age by Simon Rich, even if it posits a version of Mario who’s a bit seemy, and worries that he’s-a gonna be cancelled. But it ends on a happy note, with Mario finally getting that back surgery he’s been needing for so long. Wait, what? Also he gets scammed by Wario.

The New Yorker is one of those publications that throws up a paywall at times, probably related to how many articles you’ve seen this month, so be warned.

And I know what you’re-a thinking: “How does Super Mario go broke? You collected entire rooms of coins! What happened?” And the answer is-a simple: I trusted a close personal friend to manage-a my money. And I can’t say too much about what happened, because the lawsuit is-a ongoing, but essentially, all those years I thought that I was riding Yoshi, it was the other way around.

Link Roundup 4/27/22

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Gavin Lane of Nintendo Life: Playnote gets a Flipnote Studio-style art app.

Jay Peters of The Verge, also on Playnote. Its makers wonder if its seasonal distribution model will be appreciated by purchasers of its becranked yellow joybox.

Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life: UbiSoft to shut down server support for a number of older titles.

Florence Ion (cool name!) of Gizmodo: Google Play is getting data safety settings.

Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life, again: Lego to release a huge new Super Mario set.

Thomas Whitehead of Nintendo Life (lot of items from them today): Game Freak to offer employees option of four-day workweek. Awesome!

Wes Finlon of PC Gamer: Moneyfarm Square-Enix unveils a new $11,600 statue of Terra from Final Fantasy VI riding Magitech armor that caused series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to basically go WTF. Remember, back when he designed the first game in the series, Square was facing issues whether their little game development operation could survive.

“Master Blaster,” if that is their name, at Sora News 24, on Sega trying to bring eSports into Japanese high schools with a Puyo Puyo Boot Camp. “Listen up maggots, you’re going to spend the next hour setting up combos and fighting Draco Centauros until you get it right and I don’t want no backtalk or I’ll bust you down to facing Nohoho again!”

Rhys Wood of TechRadar: An Elden Ring demake for Game Boy is in the works.

Luke Plunkett of Kotaku: Super Mario movie delayed, Miyamoto promises it’ll be worth the wait. Aww, it’s just like that apocryphal quote often attributed to him. This reporter is overjoyed, the last one ended on that cliffhanger, Daisy was back from Dinohattan and needed Mario and Luigi’s help again, no doubt because of some scheme hatched by Koopa. I wonder how they’ll manage to bring Dennis Hopper back from the dead to reprise his role?

Alana Hauges, also from Nintendo Life: Sega plans to delist classic games from some platforms (but not Switch) in anticipation of the release of Sonic Origins.

And Ryan Dinsdale of IGN tells us Sony is creating a game preservation team, of which this reporter can only say, IT’S ABOUT FREAKING TIME.

Link Roundup 4/21/22

Slope’s Game Room has a video about the history of Golden Axe.

The Verge’s Ash Parrish writes about a revival of Lucasfilm’s 8-bit virtual world (which is not quite the same thing as a MMORPG) Habitat, something I know a little about I suppose.

Marcus Richert writing for Techradar has a provocative article suggesting that Nintendo might be either slightly younger than the company claims, by a few years, or alternatively might be much older.

Shmuplations translates three interviews from magazines with various people connected with quirky Sega action-puzzle game Chu Chu Rocket.

And Marc Normandin for Paste Magazine has an article suggesting 10 retro games that should be revived, and you know what, it’s actually a pretty great list! It’s got For The Frog The Bell Tolls, Dragon Slayer, and Terranigma on it, so it’s definitely got JRPG cred!

Sundry Sunday Extra: Pringus McDingus and Bunny Day

I don’t intend to make it a habit to post two Sundry posts in a day, but it’s Easter after all, so the subject of this one has an expiration date. This video is from a couple of years ago, when the meme that Isabelle somehow knew Doomguy was still fresh, and Nintendo was still balancing how often eggs would generate in the week before Bunny Day. There is some slight language in text, but we’re all adults here, right?

You may have already seen this, depending on who and what you are. The video has over two million views after all, but it’s important to remember the classics.

Game Boy Camera Virtual Art Gallery

From Cat Graffam on Twitter, the Game Boy Camera Art Gallery is a Game Boy rom image, in the form of an RPG-style walkaround, showing off photos taken with Nintendo’s crazy and awesome little heavily-dithered, 4-color foray into 90s digital photography. It can be viewed in-browser or as a downloadable rom, or you can purchase a cartridge with it for use on your own Game Boy or Game Boy-compatible hardware! Here are a few works from the compilation:

Nicole Express: Tengen’s NES Chips

The always-wonderful retro gaming and hardware info site Nicole Express has a great post about the chips that Tengen (a subsidiary of Atari) used in their cartridges! Tengen is a special case among NES developers, in that while a Nintendo licensee they got to use their own mapper, from Namco, but went and manufactured their own ASICs when they split off from Nintendo’s licensing program. The deets are all in the article!

Nicole Express’ archives are well worth a look, which among other items hosts their article on Zaxxon and Future Spy. They have interesting games to play on their itch.io page too! Have I used enough exclamation points yet?!

The Hidden Structure of the Overworld of Link’s Awakening

pmorinerie (on Mastodon @pmorinerie@mastodon.xyz) has been working on a full disassembly of the fourth Legend of Zelda game, Link’s Awakening on the Game Boy, and has a series of articles they’ve written about interesting technical aspects they’ve found.

One of their discoveries is of a hidden structure to the overworld of that game. Their discussion of this is fascinating, and should be referred to if you have an interest in such things. I will give a broad summary here.

The Game Boy was not given much VRAM for storing graphics. To avoid bus conflicts, the CPU that runs the system only has access to VRAM, to store new background tile information, either during VBLANK, a specific time each frame when the PPU circuitry isn’t accessing memory, or by blanking the screen entirely, which is only really feasible during major transitions, like through a door or into a hole. So, the system is limited in how quickly it can store new tiles during play.

Link’s Awakening stores two kinds of tiles in its VRAM. Most of them are from a set that’s used throughout the overworld, but a small number are overwritten, used for different purposes as Link explores the landscape. The overworld is separated into 2×2 blocks, and each can have its own set of these customized tiles.

There is a problem with this setup, however. When Link changes screens, like in the original Legend of Zelda and A Link to the Past, the screen transition scrolls smoothly between the areas. During the scroll, briefly, it’s possible for elements from two different screens to be displayed at once. How does the program handle situations where the custom tiles have two different definitions between screens?

The answer is that the overworld is cleverly designed so that there aren’t adjacent screens with walkable passages between them that use different sets of custom tiles. There are screens in the game that only use tiles from the main overworld set, and all of the places with passages between the screens with custom tiles have one of them, as a kind of memory airlock, to prevent glitches during transitions. It’s pretty clever.

If this is interesting to you, I encourage you to read the whole article, especially for the exceptional cases where the system breaks down and they had to find other ways to keep the screen from glitching.