Tag: nintendo

Hidden Dialogue in Earthbound

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: Link Breakdances in Gerudo Outfit

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)

Possibly the First US Commercial For a Nintendo Product

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):

More NES Glitches Tested in Nintendo World Championships

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:

  1. Super Mario Bros, jump over the flagpole in World 1-1: Requires time-consuming setup, and useless for saving time, as the result is Mario can’t finish the level, but it does work.
  2. More invisible ladders in Donkey Kong’s Ramps level: There are more invisible ladders than the one demonstrated in Part 1, and these aren’t caught by traps! The current World Record recorded by the servers uses it, in fact, making it an essential strategy for anyone trying to beat it.
  3. Kirby Credits Warp: One of the levels in the game has a massive trick, where Kirby can get inside a wall, and if they have the Stone ability (possible to get with Mix), can crash the game, and if the Start button is pressed on the same frame as Stone activating, the NES cart jumps straight to the credits! The crash however takes the NWC software back to the selection menu, and the Start button is disabled, so this one’s impossible to do.
  4. Legend of Zelda moving through blocks: A frequently-used trick in speedruns, it’s not caught by the NWC software but there’s no place where it’s useful for saving time.
  5. Super Mario Bros. 4-2 Wrong Warp: This is an alternate way to get to the 8-7-6 Warp Zone without having to reveal the hidden blocks, then hit and climb the vine, by going down the coin pipe shortly after without scrolling the screen far enough to change the secret area destination. Seems to be impossible to make work in NWC, as the game rewinds when the vine block is scrolled off-screen.
  6. Super Mario Bros. 8-4 Wrong Warp: Done under similar conditions to the 4-2 wrong warp, this one is caught by the emulator and rewinds the trial.
  7. Surviving Timeout in Metroid’s Escape Sequence: If Samus uses the final elevator with the right timing at the end of the escape, the explosion happens, but she survives to complete her mission anyway. It’s possible in NWC, but results in the longest-possible time to complete the trial, so it’s only useful to show off.
  8. Super Mario Bros. 8-2 Bullet Bill Flagpole Animation Skip: If Mario bounces off of a low-flying Bullet Bill right at the end of 8-2, it’s possible to trigger the flagpole, but leave Mario before the block on which the pole rests. This results in him walking into it endlessly, but it triggers the level completion sequence, and means he doesn’t have to raise the flag or walk to the castle. It’s really only a slight time save, but it does work in the NWC version of the game.

Sundry Sunday: brentalfloss’ DK Rap 2018 (NSFW)

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)

NESHacker’s Guide to the NES Hardware

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)

Wherefore MISSINGNO?

It’s another highly technical game glitch explanation, although from a source we don’t often follow here: even though it has to do with explaining glitch Pokemon from the first generation of that series, it was the ending presentation of RustCon 2020 given by Siân Griffin, despite having little to do with Rust, other than showing the possible results of not having strong memory safety in your programming language.

It’s 39 minutes long, and it might prove difficult to get through for some, but it’s good and interesting information:

I will give you an overview:

When the original Pokemon games generate a random encounter with wild Pokemon in the overworld, they refer to one of two lists in RAM memory, copied there from ROM. One list is for “grass” Pokemon, that are generated when walking through tall grass, and one is for “water” Pokemon, that are generated when in riding a Pokemon using Surf over water tiles. The lists are copied when entering a new region, with a differing enemy generation table.

Due to an oversight in the tile checking code, a different subtile is checked when generating a Pokemon from each list. This means it’s possible, on some shores, to generate a Pokemon from the grass list when actually on the water. If one of the lists has a Pokemon generation rate of 0% for its type, then its list doesn’t actually get copied. Some regions that are largely aquatic aren’t intended to ever generate grass Pokemon, and so have a 0% grass encounter rate, and so never copy a grass Pokemon encounter table. The Pokemon generated come from whatever was in memory before, which may be all zeros, or may be whatever used the memory in that area previously. Pokemon has little RAM to work with, so the Pokemon generation table memory has other things that use that memory, and one of those is data for the trainers you trade Pokemon with.

If you use Fly to fast travel to Cinnabar Island, you can reach a region where the grass encounter table won’t have been initialized, but you can still cause grass encounters to happen by Surfing on the shoreline. The contents of that table can be manipulated by doing something else that uses that memory beforehand. As a result, you can cause an encounter with an undefined Pokemon, which has the name MISSINGNO and has various glitch attributes.

Because the Pokemon has faulty definitions for some of its attributes, like appearance and cry, it’s possible to crash the game or wreck your save data from playing around with MISSINGNO. But if you run from it, this damage can be minimized. And when it tries to mark that you’ve seen MISSINGNO in the bit array that records which Pokemon you’ve seen, it overshoot that table and actually sets a bit in the memory that follows it, which usefully, is your inventory. Generate the right version of MISSINGNO and run from battle, and you may suddenly find yourself with over a hundred of an item in a specific slot in your inventory. If you put the Rare Candy there before, you now can give your Pokemon over a hundred experience levels, or you could create stat-gain items this way, or lots of Master Balls.

Glitches such as these seems like they’re rare, but really, there’s lots of games that have them. It’s one of the perils of coding your game in assembly, really.

Looygi Bros. Tests Glitches in Nintendo World Championships

Looygi Bros. obsessively plays various games and finds quirks, glitches and interesting facts about them. Their newest video tries out a bunch of known glitches in NES games and sees if they work in the new Nintendo World Championships speedrunning game. The result: in many, but not all, cases, Nintendo has put in code traps to make sure the games are operating as intended, and if they are set off, like if Mario goes through a wall or Link wraps around the screen, the emulator software declares Strategy Unavailable and resets the run. They tested 11 glitches in a ten-minute video, embedded here:

To summarize them:

  1. Minus World: the trap occurs when Mario tries to slide through the wall at the end of World 1-2.
  2. In Donkey Kong, it’s possible to climb down the first ladder, wrap around the screen, and end up on the girder right below the goal. They caught this one.
  3. Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) Fast Carpet: with two carpets spawned, you can travel extra fast. This one didn’t get caught, but the set-up time to use it makes its use in the challenge prohibitive.
  4. Wrapping the screen in The Legend of Zelda. This is one of my least favorite glitches honestly. Nintendo caught it, you can’t glitch around the screen horizontally nor get Link into the top-of-screen status area. (I also dislike the term “HUD” for these areas. Dammit Jim, it’s a video game not a jet fighter.)
  5. The “door jump” glitch in Metroid. This lets you use a door to get Samus inside the blocks that make up the edges of the screen, from there you can, depending on the situation, either wrap around the screen vertically or explore “secret worlds” created by interpreting random cartridge data as terrain. This one’s trapped.
  6. Super Mario 2 double jump. I didn’t know about this one! In some circumstances when you’re near an enemy, characters can jump in mid air. This one is both not trapped, and actually useful in the challenge!
  7. Super Mario 3 Fortress skip. In similar circumstances to passing through the wall in Super Mario Bros. to get to the Minus World, you can pass through a wall midway through the fortress to skip an area and go straight to the boss. This one’s trapped, probably checking for the same kind of situation as the Minus World trick.
  8. Super Mario Bros. wall jump. Not trapped, and conceivably useful in the World 8-4 completion challenge to get into the elevated pipe.
  9. Kid Icarus fortress 1 shortcut. There’s a way to glitch through a wall early in the route through the fortress that takes you almost to the end. This one is trapped, but it’s triggered, not when you get through the wall, but when you go through the room’s exit. It probably makes sure you go through all the essential rooms in order.
  10. Super Mario Bros. 2 cave skip. It’s a way to glitch through a wall so you don’t have to wait for a bomb to explode. It’s tricky but possible, you end up taking damage to get through it though.
  11. Super Mario Bros. 2 item attachment. A complex trick that lets you get items into areas where they aren’t intended to go. Technically this is untrapped and usable. In conjunction with the cave skip trick, it’s possible to kill Birdo with a Shy Guy, potentially with one throw instead of having to wait for three eggs to throw back at her. Looygi Bros was unable to get the whole trick to work in the World Championships software, but offers the possibility of it working to whoever can chain together all the necessary techniques.

I find it interesting that the tricks were disabled through traps instead of fixing their games, they seem to have enough technical know-how to know how the glitches work to check for them in the emulation layer, but maybe fixing them was deemed against the spirit of the game, or they didn’t want to risk changing the game’s essential behavior?

The Mr. Saturn Text Generator

ꔠ⋲ɣ-ơ! 𝕂ηơ⍵ ɣơ⊔ ⍭ꔠ⋲ꭱ⋲ β⋲ ᨓꭱ. یƌ⍭⊔ꭱη ⍭⋲ⵋ⍭ 𝙶⋲η⋲ꭱƌ⍭ơꭱ ơη ⋲ƌꭱ⍭ꔠ ⟟η⍭⋲ꭱη⋲⍭ βơ⟟η𝙶? ⟟⍭ ηơ⍭ β⋲ φ⋲ꭱⴥ⋲ᘓ⍭ β⊔⍭ ⟟⍭ ơⴥ ی⊔ⴥⴥ⟟ᘓ⟟⋲η⍭ ⍵ƌᘓ𝕂⟟η⋲یی ⍭ơ ᨓƌ𝕂⋲ ⟟ᨓφꭱ⋲یی⟟ơη ơη ⴥꭱ⟟⋲ηɗ ƌηɗ ᨓơηی⍭⋲ꭱ ƌℓ⟟𝕂⋲! ɗƌ𝕂ơ⍭ƌ!

(Did you know there is a website that will convert whatever you enter into an approximation of the text from Mr. Saturn from Earthbound and Mother 3? It doesn’t look exactly like it does in the games, but it is certainly reminiscent of it. Dakota! Dakota?)

It turns out there is a TrueType Mr. Saturn font as well, as presented in this Reddit post. Note that this link should not be construed to mean that I in any way approve of Reddit, or of how much internet content that it’s concentrated under its fetid profit-seeking embrace. That’s where this is, so that’s where I linked. It is a vectorized version of a pixel font recreation of Saturn-speak, which is available here. Message over boing!

Phred’s Cool Punch-Out!!

The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….

It’s a little risky to post this, because it’s a joke video game page on Tripod from 2001 that still somehow persists on the internet in 2024. I have to imagine that Phred is in his mid-to-late 40s by now. There’s several long pages here from that site, and there’s always the chance that a racist or neo-nazi joke, from an age when kids thought lightly of such things, could be lurking somewhere in there. Please understand it as a product of its time. It’s an amateurish site, but it has a lot of energy behind it.

I think it’s still worth looking at as a reminder of that age of the internet, which had many bad things about it, but also a lot of good things. I don’t know which this is. It contains a number of pretty dumb graphics hacks for Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and/or its successor released after Nintendo’s licensing deal with Tyson ran out. Those hacks can be found here, although the background (the words “Master Phred” in fancy letters) makes the descriptions and download links really hard to read. (Try highlighting the text.) If you follow a few links, you can find actual NES Punch-Out rom downloads, which it’s even more amazing to find on a website in 2024.

Among the hacked characters are a robot, Doc Louis and Zelda, sure

The characters page includes, among other hacked characters like Rick and Nick Bruiser from the SNES Punch-Out, a character named after the Wii Punch-Out opponent Disco Kid, which indicates this page has to have been updated since 2009. There’s a links page where every outgoing link, other than GameFAQs, is broken, and a secrets page where most of the secrets are fake.

Well there it is, Phred’s Cool Punch-Out. You’ve survived 23 years. May you live a hundred more.

Phred’s Cool Punch-Out!! (tripod.com)

The Marquee and Instruction Card For Vs. Super Mario Bros.

Vs. Super Mario Bros. was the arcade version of Super Mario Bros., which made it to US arcades a few months after the NES release. It’s a much harder game than the home version, with levels brought in from the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, and operator adjustments that can make it even more difficult.

A little remarked-upon aspect of the game is that it came about before the drawn character design of Mario and his enemies had been solidified, at least in the US, so the official arcade release of SMB had a weird marquee, with an image design that was never drawn upon by later releases:

Image scavenged from gameongrafix.com

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the flyer they distributed to promote the game when it was going to be titled Mario’s Adventure:

And even more interesting, it had this title card. Behold, an official Mario looking meaner than he ever had before or has since!

Can’t sleep. Mario will kill me.

Bringle’s Obscure Changes in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

I wish that these videos weren’t always videos. A lot of this information would be delivered just as effectively in text, but these days a lot of game researchers have abandoned good old text for flashy video, or otherwise locked-off Discord servers that don’t add to our common body of knowledge. I’ve complained about this before, and I am liable to keep complaining about it. Because I’m right about this, and yet it doesn’t change. Get to fixing this, world!

The video (21 minutes) has a lot of interesting changes though. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has sustained a huge amount of fan interest over the years, due to its story being actually really good for a Mario game, it’s terrific sense of humor, and its deep gameplay. It’s generally agreed to be the highlight of the whole Paper Mario series, building on the ideas of the first game.

This is a good opportunity to muse upon what the gameplay merits of TYD are. I identify these:

  • The combat system, which keeps most of your moves useful in different ways by giving them special properties that make intuitive sense. Jumps can’t hit spiked enemies or enemies on the ceiling, while hammer attacks only hit the first enemy in line and can’t hit enemies in the air. There are exceptions to these rules, but they’re more costly. Follower attacks also have their own limitations along these lines.
  • The action commands, and Guard and Superguard functions. Paper Mario wasn’t the first JRPG to add a timed minigame to combat (that may have been Super Mario RPG), but the design here is very good. Most moves have an action command minigame where good performance increases the move’s power. Guard reduces the damage taken from attacks by pressing a button in a brief time window, while Superguard negates damage if a different button is pressed in a briefer time window. The button you press changes both the difficulty and the reward. Both aren’t easy to perform consistently, as many enemy attacks have tricky timing, but the Superguard bonus is great enough that it’s really tempting to use it. All three of these functions largely replace the general randomness and variance in JRPG combat, making it a lot more skill-based. (Finding ways for players to demonstrate skill in RPG-style games is a long-standing design challenge. I should write something about that here in the future!)
  • And then there’s the joy of exploration, and the many secrets in the game world that reward it. Paper Mario had a bunch of them, but TYD really goes overboard. I can’t name a game with as much cool stuff thrown into its game world for players to just happen upon. The old line used in many Nintendo game manuals is to “try everything,” but how much of everything should the player really try? TYD is one of the few games that feels like it lives up to the true breadth of that word. There is a character in the game whose purpose is to give the player hints at finding obscure secrets. The Trouble Center offers further rewards and fleshes out the game world by giving Mario and friends the opportunity to perform helpful tasks for people. There’s so many things to do!

Super Paper Mario also had a lot of tricks, but it had a worse story (IMO), and it completely abandoned the classic Paper Mario battle system. Later Paper Mario games went in a completely different direction with unique battle systems for each. It was Thousand Year Door that got the most right in a single game.

So, um. The video! Yes, watch it, it’s interesting.

Obscure Changes in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (Youtube, 21 minutes)