The Flipside of Gaming
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
We haven’t covered anything of the exquisitely-made Youtube animation series A Fox In Space yet. Probably someday. But as it was just released and it’s really timely, here is Wolf O’Donnell reacting to Fox and crew’s costumes. CW: bleeped profanity.
Peppy is Beetlejuice? What?
A Fox In Space: Are You Guys Trick or Treating? (Youtube, 36 seconds)
Oh Nintendo. As people following this blog can easily see, we have more than a little fondness for the output resulting from the playing card and igo board maker’s lucrative side venture into video games. Everyone wants to make them like Nintendo, but no one else actually does, or seems to be able to, or can even pin down what that would mean.
Maybe it’s because, despite being one of the biggest companies in the world, it still feels like a small company, in some ways? Or that they don’t seem as beholden to the bleeding knife of capitalism as other companies are? (This is illusory, of course.) Maybe it’s their adherence to Japanese corporate traditions, or the influence of Shigeru Miyamoto, or their toymaker’s vibe?
But there is a dark side to them as well: they can be incredibly controlling regarding their IPs. Years ago they reached out to a fan
They have what they would call a staunch anti-piracy stance, which you’d expect of most software companies sure, but what that ends up meaning, due to the fact that 99% of their software is made for closed systems like consoles and mobile (we haven’t forgotten about the Animal Crossing PC clock!), they have absolutely no modding support.
This has resulted in a zero-tolerance policy regarding infractions concerning the competitive Smash Bros. scene. Project M is a popular fan-made hack of Super Smash Bros. Melee that it feels like even mentioning will cause Nintendo to affix a red letter to your organization.
Kotaku has reported that there is currently another round of fan backlash over Nintendo’s guidelines over the use of Smash Bros. games in community tournaments. There is good reason: the rules read like they were written by people ignorant of the extent of competitive Smash play.
Nintendo is also demanding tournament prices not rise above $5,000, and is disallowing sponsorships. While it’s true that Nintendo is justifiably a bit cautious about the edginess surrounding esports tournaments, which resulted in sexual misconduct allegations back in 2020, there is definitely a middle ground between preventing situations like that and hamstringing a burgeoning esport, and Nintendo should pursue it, or risk destroying this entire scene.
As I said, I am not a lawyer. Someone who is, is Moonie, who used his incredibly ZeFrank-sounding voice to made a Youtube video breaking down Nintendo’s new guidelines. He doesn’t seem as worried about them as others (the thumbnail to his video is a giant DON’T PANIC). Here is his 18-minute dive into the guidelines, but a major point is that they primarily affect unaffiliated community tournaments, which as a class are distinct from majors, which would have an explicit agreement with Nintendo that would make the limitations in these guidelines not apply. In order words, while some of the furor is justified (other companies like Capcom aren’t as limiting of community events), a lot of it is the result of failed Nintendo messaging. Nintendo does have a lot of trouble communicating things like this that won’t get everyone’s roar up.
But even with that proviso, it’s still not great? Nintendo is still claiming that fan modifications are entirely forbidden, even among community tournaments.
What do I think? Nintendo could fix all of this by changing their EULA by explicitly recognizing and allowing for fan work, but in a way that asserts the primacy of their IP. Again, IANAL, but if they put their own lawyers to work to try to forge a system whereby fans could continue to build off of their work, they might be able to do it in such a way that they don’t risk damaging their properties. Other companies have done it, notably Sega, who blessed fangame creators in a way that generated their megahit Sonic Mania. What is causing Nintendo’s overreaction here, in my onion*, is their institutional distaste for even acknowledging that people are hacking their systems and modifying their games in the first place.
* typo made on purpose
I must acknowledge, there would be a whole flowchart of knock-on effects if Nintendo were to acknowledge and accept fan modifications, and probably not all of them would be to Nintendo’s benefit. Particularly, just to modify their software requires breaking their system security, which doesn’t necessarily imply piracy but does mean opening up the system sandbox and maybe revealing system secrets like keys. Sega doesn’t make consoles any more, so it’s not an issue they have to worry about now.
But what is obvious is that they’ve frequently attacked a vibrant community, and making a lot of enemies out of players. There has to be a good solution to this.
Super Smash Bros. Fans Freak Out About New Nintendo Rules (Kotaku)
A Lawyer Analyzes Nintendo’s Tournament Guidelines (Moon Channel on Youtube, 18 minutes)
Advance Wars By Web is a long-standing website allowing for Advance Wars games to take place between players online. It’s old enough that it came out before Advance Wars Dual Strike, the first DS Advance Wars game, and has survived long enough to see the release of Dual Strike, Advance Wars Days of Ruin, and now Advance Wars 1+2: Reboot Camp.
The first Advance Wars game had a legendary awkward launch date: September 10, 2001. I don’t know if world events following it had any influence on its popularity, but Advance Wars had the advantage of being a long-running series, going back to the Famicom, that had never been given a chance in Western territories. (One reason? Super Famicom Wars had a notorious character named Hister, with a moustache that made its inspiration unmistakable.)
The first two Advance Wars titles, taking their name, like previous versions, from its release platform the Gameboy Advance, were unexpectedly popular. The gaming groups I was in in college played an incredible amount of Advance Wars 2. We maxed out the game’s timer at 999 hours! I have no doubt that, if our group hadn’t broken up from people graduating and leaving, we’d still be playing it today.
Both of these games are preserved in proper fashion by Wayforward’s Switch remake of Advance Wars and its immediate sequel. Of the two games after it, Dual Strike leans a bit too hard on CO powers (already a creeping problem in AW2), and Days of Ruin implemented a lot of gameplay adjustments and fixed but, alas, lost the weird sense of fun from the semi-cartoony characters and setting of the first two games.
The Gameboy Advance Advance Wars games did not have internet-enabled multiplayer. The DS versions had better options, but they’re unavailable now, at least without some technical effort, due to the shutdown of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.
Advance Wars By Web both allows a game much like AW2 to be played over the internet, and it does so with features that make it feel like a play-by-mail game, with the site handling the state involved with turn-based multiplayer. It does this at the of having any form of single-player: all of its battles are against other human players. So it’s not an excellent way to learn to play Advance Wars games interactively, as with the official games, which easy you into the game a bit at a time. But as for learning how to play this online version, there’s a number of useful videos available on their Tutorials Page. I especially like their video on overcoming first turn advantage, which they do by spotting the second player one Infantry unit. It’s not a perfect solution, but one that works out fairly well in play. And the video on designing balanced multiplayer maps, which offers a lot of practical advice that can be carried over into designing maps for the original games. And there’s a huge library of over 3,800 games to view, if you want to see how the community plays.
I don’t know if Reboot Camp is helping to sustain the avid fandom that the first Advance Wars games did, but I’ve enjoyed it a lot. If you enjoy it too, you can go from Reboot Camp right into playing against people online on AWBW. I can’t offer much more about it than that, for Advance Wars is a deceptively deep game and I have to make a post here, on the average, every day, but it’s been offering online play between humans for nearly twenty years now! That has to count for something.
Advance Wars By Web (awbw.amarriner.com)
There was apparently a leak of the upcoming Super Mario Bros Wonder game (the first hour of gameplay is here), and it has a terrific little sequence that makes me think it’s going to become highly memeable. The part that really makes it for me is the flowers’ comments. Here it is, edited down to just that sequence. Note that this is a spoiler, but it’s for only the second level of the a whole long game.
Because of the danger it’ll be taken down, I’m not uploading this to Youtube. Please enjoy, it’s about a minute long.
Much much later, in a secret world, there is a reprise of this idea, and it’s much harder. Warning you now, It’s a more significant spoiler, not for story reasons, but just for existing. It’s fun, but looks pretty hard! I got the video out of a much longer video, at 4 1/2 hours and showing off all of that secret world, here. This is just that level, at two minutes long:
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
It’s another video! And it’s Nintendo related! I bet you’re just thrilled!
This is one, however, is far from something the Big N would approve of. Snooplax goes into great detail in explaining the history of hacking Super Mario 64, the first 3D game to really have a substantial hacking scene–I don’t count things like DOOM, since to a degree it was made to be extensible. Nintendo never dreamed that people would do the things to the Mario 64 engine that they have, which has included optimizing it to the extent that it can run at 60 fps on original hardware!
Seeing all these hacks together in one video is rather inspiring. There’s been not one, but at least three, major Super Mario 64 level editors, with different degrees of flexibility and detail. What enthusiasts have done with the engine over the years is surprising, and there’s no end in sight, so please enjoy this look back at this prolific scene.
History of SM64 Rom Hacks (Youtube, 37 minutes)
Let’s get the video embed out of the way first. Pow!
Super Mario Bros. 3 has two significant minigames (outside of two-player mode), and the inner workings of both are explained in this video.
In most worlds there are “Space Panels,” which provide a slot machine minigame for extra lives. If you’ve ever tried them, you might have noticed that it’s extremely difficult to win anything at it. Well, the video explains why that is: there’s a significant random element to stopping the wheels. In particular, the last wheel has so much randomness in when it actually stops that it’s actually completely random what it’ll stop on! So much for timing!
I have a theory (which I explain in a comment on that video) that the slot machine game was made so random because of the quality of the reward (it’s possible to earn up to five extra lives at it), and because they had played around with life-granting minigames before. Doki Doki Panic, which got reskinned for overseas markets at Super Mario Bros. 2, has a slot machine game, “Bonus Chance,” that appears after every level. With good timing and practice Bonus Chance can be mastered, earning up to five extra lives for every coin plucked in the level. I have managed to abuse that game to earn so many extra lives that the game ran out of numbers for the tens’ digit of the life counter, sending it into letters of the alphabet. There’s certainly no danger of that in Super Mario Bros. 3.
The second minigame has the player match cards from a grid of 24. Each pair of cards found earns a modest prize, from as little as 10 coins up to a single extra life. Most of the awards are powerups for the player’s inventory. The player gets two tries, but if they don’t clear the board it’ll carry over to the next time they play. Attempts at the card matching board appear every 80,000 points the player earns, making it the only Super Mario game to actually reward scoring lots of points.
The card matching game is one of the most interesting minigames in all of the Mario series. There’s only eight layouts for the cards, the second and fifth cards of the middle row are frequently both the 1UP card, and the last three cards on the bottom row are always Mushroom, Flower and Star, in that order. This means the minigame can be mastered, and even if you don’t memorize all eight layouts to deduce where the prizes are, knowing the three cards that never change usually means it won’t take more than two or three attempts to clear the board, netting lots of powerups.
Retro Game Mechanics Explained looks into why the card matching game works the way it does, and discovered some interesting things. There’s actually code in the game to do a much more thorough randomization of the cards, but it goes unutilized. The full details are in the video, but in summary:
The only variation in the steps is from the choice of whether to shift once or thrice, each of those three times. Thus, there are only 23 possible layouts, that is, 8. There is a loop in there to potentially vary the number of times the cards are swapped (the second way to scramble the cards), but the way it’s written the loop is never used, and the cards are swapped only once each time.
What I also find interesting is, this isn’t the only Nintendo to use a minigame that involves mixing up hidden prizes. Kid Icarus’ Treasure Rooms also have a limited number of layouts, which vary for each of the game’s three worlds. The player can open pots in the room to collect minor items, but if they open the wrong pot early, before opening all the others, they find the God of Poverty, and lose everything they’ve found. If they can save that pot for last, though, the final pot will instead contain a pretty good prize, which can even be a Credit Card item that cannot be obtained otherwise.
The way they’re designed, both Mario 3’s card-matching game and Kid Icarus’s Treasure Rooms have tells, specific spots that can be revealed to identify which of the limited number of boards that version of the game is using, and that the player can use to get all the prizes. Also, there are Nintendo-published guides that reveal all the layouts, in Nintendo Power for Kid Icarus (recounted on this charmingly old-school webpage), and the Nintendo Power guide for Super Mario Bros. 3 (on page 10), so Nintendo had to have been aware of the limited nature of the board layouts, and may have actually intended them to be defeated with a good strategy.
SMB3 Roulette & Card Matching Games Explained (Youtube, 20 minutes)
The sudden release of F-Zero 99, free to play for Nintendo Switch Online members, has brought Nintendo’s ultrafast racing series back into the spotlight after 20 years. (Well, there were some GBA games, but they don’t seem to be as much remembered these days?)
F-Zero 99 gets its aesthetic from the original SNES game, which is nice, but also feels like a bit of a waste. Nintendo created 26 new characters for F-Zero X, and the Amusement Vision team at Sega (creators of the Monkey Ball series!) made some more for F-Zero GX. And the cool thing is, none of the characters feel like an afterthought. Every one of these weirdos could star in their own video game. F-Zero GX gives all of them voice acting in their endings, and even their own theme song!
Most significantly, every F-Zero GX playable character has a short movie that’s unlocked if you complete all the Grand Prix leagues with them on Master difficulty. But that is a huge feat! F-Zero GX is ludicrously difficult even on lower difficulties, and some of the cars are more suited to driving well than others.
Of course, on Youtube you can find a compilation of all the pilot profile movies. Many of them are really silly. Here they are:
And as an extra, here’s a playlist of the 41 character theme songs from F-Zero GX:
F-Zero GX: All Pilot Profile Movies (Youtube, 28 minutes)
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
Some months ago there were the “Gigaleaks,” huge troves of internal Nintendo files and documents that revealed a lot about abandoned projects and the development history of popular games.
There was so much information in them that people are still discovering new details. One thing that was surprisingly overlooked was source code for the version of Super Mario Bros. included in the SNES remake within Super Mario All-Stars. The source contained quite a lot of interesting commented-out lines and other data, that seemed to indicate that it may have been a hacked-up version of the source to the original Super Mario Bros.
A lot (but not all!) of this has been covered on the Prerelease page for Super Mario Bros. on The Cutting Room Floor. You can go read about it there. There resides information on scrapped enemies and objects, weird modes and behaviors of existing objects, and lots of other curiosities.
For the 38th anniversary of the release of Super Mario Bros., Nimaginendo Games made a romhack that seeks to recreate many of these abandoned elements, and shows it off in a Youtube video. The hack can be downloaded from a link in the video’s description, but only for a little while! I should emphasize that it’s not a real prototype, but a speculative recreation based on information from the leaked source. It even has an older version of SMB’s title screen.
Extra! Did you know that an early working English title for Super Mario Bros. was Mario’s Adventure? And Nintendo of America even made a promotional flyer with that name! These images come from Flyer Fever:
Super Mario Bros. Beta/Prototype recreated in 2023 (Youtube, 8 minutes, link to rom in the video’s description)
It’s yet another Youtube video post, but the subject is pretty notable, U Can Beat Video Games at last tackling the highlight of the Metroid series, Super Metroid for SNES, in an epic-length episode. Often big games get split up into multiple parts, but this time the whole game is covered at once. These videos can’t be easy to put together, and I appreciate the effort that goes into them!
As usual UCBVG covers the entire game, including all items and known cheats, and alternate endings. If you’ve ever wondered why GDQ players, hosts and audience ever shout “Kill the animals” or “Save the animals,” the ending to this video should fill in the blanks to an acceptable degree.
U Can Beat Video Games: Super Metroid (3 hours 37 minutes)
Yep, we link a lot of videos. Sadly a lot of gaming stuff now takes the form of videos. Text is my preference, but it’s where the content is right now.
And this isn’t the first time we’ve linked to AsumSaus, whose beat is the competitive Smash Melee scene. There’s lots of Youpotatoes out there, but AsumSaus appeals to me greatly. His videos aren’t edited into a confusing mess, they don’t sound like morning zoo radio hosts on crack, there aren’t lots of swishy objects moving around. It’s surprising how many Youtubers spend so much effort making their videos unwatchable, but AsumSaus isn’t one of them. They’re accessible, entertaining, interesting, and sane. All around, great.
Most of AsumSaus’ videos are around 10 minutes long, but this time we have a long-form video, at 54 minutes it’s almost movie-length, but it’s worth it. It’s the story of aMSa, a Japanese player of Super Smash Bros Melee. It turns out Japan is not a great scene for competitive Smash Melee, the best players are widely considered to be in the US and Europe. Not only that, but for much of his career professional Melee was only a side-gig for him, he held down a demanding day job in his home country, and had to travel to tournament events when he could.
But none of those things are the most surprising thing about aMSa. The most surprising thing is that aMSa plays Yoshi. He’s the only top-tier Melee player who does.
When he began, Yoshi was considered F-Tier. To explain to those not familiar with competitive fighting game terminology, the community around games tends to sort the characters into “tiers,” each containing characters considered to be of roughly equivalent strength. Usually these are rated alphabetically, with “S” given an honorary place at the top of the list, according to gaming custom. So, S-tier characters are the best, A-tier characters are second best, and so on down. Usually the worst at F-tier, or even a little lower. Sometimes, if one character really rules, they might be rated SS-tier, or even potentially SSS-tier.
In 2010, the tier list for Smash Melee characters was considered to be this:
At the top of the heap are Fox, whose positive Melee attributes have been a meme for many years now, Falco (who plays very similarly to Fox), Jigglypuff (the best floater in Melee, and who also has Pound for extra saves and Rest for instant kills), and Sheik, who is almost as fast as Fox. In Melee, Sheik could turn into Zelda with a move. No one does this though, because Zelda is way down in Tier F. Tier F characters are widely considered to suck. But, another character in tier F is Yoshi.
Why is Yoshi rated so badly? The obvious reasons (well, obvious to people familiar with Smash Bros) are: Yoshi doesn’t have an up+B save move (it throws an egg instead of serving as a third jump); and, Yoshi’s shield is unusual, encasing them in an egg instead of providing the usual bubble-shield, and Yoshi can’t jump immediately out of it. Yoshi has positive aspects too, but those two are pretty huge.
More recent tier lists for Melee all rate Yoshi much more highly. But it’s not because a lot of players have achieved a good rate of success with Yoshi. It’s entirely because of aMSa. One player, out of hundreds, is the reason Yoshi was rated at B+ tier in 2021, and that’s aMSa.
I don’t want to give away the ending of AsumSaus’ video. aMSa doesn’t win every match, in fact they lose a great many, because in tournaments they play against the very best in the world. But they do experience a lot of success, and beyond that, they seem to be genuinely a good person. aMSa is almost always smiling after a match, win or lose, because they’re having a great time. They’re always gracious to their opponent. It’s easy to get on their side. Crowds love them too.
Here, then, is the journey of aMSa, and their red Yoshi. A top-level professional Smash Melee player, with the least likely character. And be sure to stick around for the very end, as AsumSaus picked the best-possible ending music for the video.
aMSa: The Only Yoshi (who could do it) (Youtube, 54 minutes)
I’m working on something big for you all, but it’ll take some time to get ready. So to free up time for working on that, here’s something I’ve been saving, a Youtube video exploring manga based on Nintendo characters, from the account of S Class Anime. Enjoy!
Exploring the World of Nintendo Manga (Youtube, 20 minutes)
DragonCon has had a variety of gaming options going back at least a decade.
They used to have, for a surprisingly long time really, a set of networked Battletech pods that some people would dutifully bring every year, with N64-level graphics, that had a dedicated following. The pods were made up in an immersive fashion, in a way that suggested perhaps a connection to the old Battletech Centers, which appear to still be in operation. I hear those stopped coming to DragonCon due to COVID and have yet to return. Weirdly, the pen-and-paper version of Battletech itself, which was almost dead for a long while, made it to DragonCon this year in huge fashion.
They have a board game area where for a $10 fee you can check out a game to play for a while. Sadly I found that area completely unusable this year, despite bringing two of my own board games (Le Havre and Caylus) to play there: its proximity to the music arcade game area (post forthcoming on that) made it impossible to be heard except by almost shouting. There were other tables, but also a lot of competition between Magic, dexterity games, demos, figure painting, Warhammer, Battletech, and a big area devoted to “US Army E-sports,” a phrase that fills me with sadness to type.
Also on the gaming floor was an area where one could check out PC and console games and systems and play them. I found their selection a bit lacking; I have a few personal systems I had emailed them about bringing, but as in the past when I’ve reached out about such things, I never got a response. I suppose that’s understandable, but it’d have been nice to let people play Dreamcast or Saturn games from my own collection.
The console gaming group ran three “challenge run” tournaments where you could try to complete objectives on NES games for prizes. I entered all three (finish all the levels in Super Mario Bros 3 World 1, finish any five levels of Mega Man 2, and a Link to the Past randomizer) but despite playing fairly well, by my standards at least, didn’t win any of them. Pretty good game players among DragonCon’s visitors this year!
Somewhere at the convention was a setup for Artemis Bridge Simulator, which could be thought of as a more elaborate and serious-minded version of Spaceteam. Its location didn’t lie tangent to my con travels this year, but it was mentioned in the con materials. (I suspect it was upstairs somewhere in the Westin.)
I had thought to bring my 2DS and see if I could get some Street Passes, with big conventions like DragonCon being one of the few places left that one could hope to get significant activity, but the odds that more than a handful had thought to both bring their 3DS-type systems and have them on their persons and in sleep mode through the con seem to be slim in 2023. Anyway, I didn’t bring mine.
So now we come to the Gamecube “panels,” which were actually just a bunch of Gamecubes and Wiis set up with classic Gamecube games, along with some entertaining display decoration. No speakers, no podiums, just a bunch of seats, systems, players, and some staff.
There were four of these this year, each late at night in the Westin Augusta ballroom, themed after multiplayer, Super Mario, Zelda and Smash Bros, in order. Really though, they all were primarily multiplayer themed. I showed up for two nights, the first and Zelda ones, and on Zelda night I mostly spent the time showing people how to finish NES The Legend of Zelda, giving directions for getting through the overworld and dungeons from memory. The people there expressed concern over the game’s difficulty, and how many of them couldn’t complete it, as a kid or even now; evidently they don’t watch many speedrunners.
There were the predictable Melee players, of course. Super Smash Bros Melee’s influence on the series, and on gaming as a whole, is unmistakable. After all, each Nintendo console since then has had to have support for Gamecube controllers, in some way, just to allow Melee masters to have their favorite playstyles, and Nintendo keeps making (or at least licensing) the production of new Gamecube-compatible controllers specifically for that scene.
But my favorite game at the Gamecube panels had to have been Kirby Air Ride, in City Trial mode. I’ve mentioned my fondness for this game here before, but to give a brief refresher: multiple Kirbys zoom around on Warp Stars, whose speeds rival those of the cars in F-Zero, through a large (though not too large) city area, searching for powerups, and boxes that contain more powerups. Players can interact with each other, and can change vehicles. Random events occur. After a set time, they’re all thrown into a random event (from a large selection) with the customized vehicle they made during the game. It’s a surprising amount of fun, and I was pleased to find other players there at least as fanatical about City Trial as I was. I think it’s one of the best multiplayer games on the system.
I had brought a few multiplayer Gamecube games of my own, including Wario Ware: Mega Party Games ($900 on Amazon!) and Ribbit King ($362), but as with the console group they were uninterested. Understandable of course, I brought them along only in the off chance. Just, slightly sad.
Here are pictures I took of the Gamecube event:
Next time, a look at the many music games they had this year. I think that’s the extent of my game-related pictures, so please be patient a little longer!