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):

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In the meantime, here’s another ridiculous glitch, explained by Skawo. (7 minutes) Skawo’s style is to use onscreen text to do the talking, which I can appreciate since I usually have subtitles on anyway.

In brief, due to the way the game handles weather, if you enter Kakariko Village during a certain story event, then leave it immediately, it starts raining heavily, then doesn’t have the chance to stop. The game handles lighting separately for each time of day and each kind of weather. Kakariko has a table for the specific kind of weather for that event, HEAVY_RAIN, but most places don’t, so the game refers to a table of garbage data to provide lighting for places. That causes Hyrule Field to take on a bright purple hue, among other places. Have a look!

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First video (beginning to the end of the second dungeon + extras):

Second video (Jabu-Jabu’s Belly through to the end of the Forest Temple):

Third video (the Fire Temple, the Water Temple and the fetch quest to get Biggoron’s Sword):

Fourth video (The Shadow and Spirit Temples and the end):

Is that not enough? Rival channel U Can Beat Video Games has been churning through all of Final Fantasy VI (a.k.a. III, it’s complicated), having done five videos so far with one left to go, with videos ranging in length between 3⅓ to 4 hours: Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four – Part Five.

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On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Every GDQ, I find out about several things that I feel are worth telling all of you about. It happened once again this year, and that’s why I’m now pointing you to an invaluable speedrunning resource, the Ocarina of Time Practice Rom.

Of course, I don’t think you’ll want to speedrun it. But if you ever want to test something out in the game and don’t want to play through the whole of OoT to do it, it could be very useful. It’s distributed in the form of a patch program, available for Windows, Mac or Linux, and you’ll have to do a bit of command-line typing to run it. And you’ll have to supply the rom file yourself, of course, but that’s the case with all the offerings proffered by our sunglasses-wearing green friend up above. The makers offer support for the Virtual Console release of Ocarina of Time, but if you choose to play it in real hardware, you should know that the Practice Rom requires the 4 MB Expansion RAM upgrade for your N64. If you came by your Nintendo 64 unit second-hand, open the little hatch on the top of the console: if the little module in there has a red top, that’s the “Expansion Pak,” as Nintendo called it. If it has a black top, then you don’t have the expansion, just the “Jumper Pak” that came standard. If there’s just a hole in there, then you don’t have either, and your system won’t work!

Let’s assume that you get it all working, and both have a new copy of the Practice Rom and a way to run it. How does it work, and what does it do? Once it’s started up, it’ll take you to the game’s title screen like usual. Press Start and you’ll be at the File Select screen as usual. Enter a name and start the file, and you’ll even be taken to the intro cutscene.

But no one says you’ll have to wait through it. Hold the R button and press L, and a menu will appear:

From here, you can use the Control Pad, or whatever your controller’s version of it is, to navigate this menu, while you continue to play the game, in real-time, with the Control Stick and other buttons. Pressing L selects things from the menu, and R goes back up a level.

Is this useful? Well, maybe? Or maybe not. Are video games useful? I present it mostly as a curiosity. If you just want to play the game then mostly it gets in the way. It’s not a randomizer or remix, it’s just straight Ocarina, but with these extra things added. It has a full user’s manual on its website, and to make decent use of it you’ll probably need to spend some time with it. Check it out, if you’re of a mind.

OoT Practice Rom (practicerom.com)

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If you don’t know anything about this, you are truly blessed by Din, Nayru and Farore. In summary, Eiji Aonuma, Nintendo’s overseer of the Legend of Zelda game series, has declared that almost all of the game in the long series fit into a massive set of timelines. Not a single timeline, because Ocarina of Time had a time travel plot, and that gave them the opportunity to split the series continuity, from that point, into three branches.

Most of this was described in Hyrule Historia book, one of three books that Dark Horse Comics put out, official tomes explaining much abo/ut the series and its canonical sequence of events. They also put up a website with the gist of things. Chronologically, the first four games in the series, unbelievably, are Skyward Sword, The Minish Cap(!), the Four Swords game that came with the GBA remake of Link to the Past (!!), then Ocarina of Time.

After that, there are three timelines: one in which Link didn’t defeat Ganon at the end of Ocarina of time, and the split timelines of Adult and Child link in that game. Why Ocarina gets special treatment for Link losing and none of the other games I can’t definitively say, except that it probably gives them more room into which to slot the series’ continued proliferation.

If Ganon in OoT wins, we get the timeline of A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, A Link Between Worlds (which is essentially a direct sequel to aLttP), Tri-Force Heroes (remember that), and then, at the end of this line, the originals themselves: The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

Then we have two lines for Adult Link’s time and Child Link’s time. For Link the Elder, there’s Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, which is interesting since Adult Link creates a legacy where his descendants are all heroes as children, and indeed Hyrule is destroyed at the end of Wind Waker (I hope I’m not spoiling anything), Ganondorf is definitely killed, and the following two games take place in a new land. I’d love to see that era explored further, but we haven’t heard anything from it since the DS. “Meanwhile” Link the Younger has Majora’s Mask, Twilight Princess and Four Swords Adventures.

You might notice some interesting absences. What about Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom? People who have played all the way through those will notice a history that doesn’t jibe with the others, and the Triforce is hardly seen in either of them! In it the Sheikah is technically advanced, Hyrule has a history of technology, and Ganondorf arose all over again, not even to mention those Zonai people! What giveth?

Aonuma has said that those games don’t place on any of the current timelines! And Hyrule Warriors is its own alternate dimension, and the BotW-themed Hyrule Warriors sequel is probably also an alternate universe.

Until Echoes of Wisdom, the most recent game, those were the forefront of the Zelda metachronology, and seems to indicate that Nintendo was forging the series afresh. But on a different chronology page than the one I linked above, Echoes of Wisdom has been placed on the timeline, as part of the Hero is Defeated branch coming off of Ocarina of Time, after Tri-Force Heroes, but before The Legend of Zelda.

All of this is largely meaningless, of course. Some games refer to past games, but just as many forge ahead with only incidental callbacks. Aonuma has said that they don’t really pay much attention to where a game will fit into the timeline when making it, which explains why BotW and TotK throw away all that continuity, other than some familiar place names. But now we know that, somewhere in Nintendo, there is a poor shlub whose job it is to try to make it all fit together, and that they threw up their hands with the two open world games.

A thankless task. And who knows how long it can even be kept up? Eventually they’ll end up pulling a Castlevania, reboot the whole damn thing, and where from there? Crisis on Infinite Hyrules? Secret Imprisoning Wars? Nintendo52? I don’t even like to speculate upon it.

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OoT handles fiery environments without the Red Tunic, and being held underwater by wearing Iron Boots without the Blue Tunic, in an unusual away. You might expect them to return Link to the last safe place he had been, like when falling into a void, or else maybe kill him instantly, or at least cause periodic damage. Instead, for whatever reason, the designers chose a unique way to implement the danger Link is in.

While in hot places or stuck underwater without the proper tunic, the game starts a timer, with time relative to the amount of health that Link has. If Link leaves the area or puts on the right tunic before time runs out, the timer goes away and Link takes no damage regardless of how much time was left on it. However, if the timer expires before Link reaches safety, he just dies instantly, “getting a game over” in the clumsy parlance of video games. You’d think it’d be better just to inflict some damage on Link every few seconds, but that’s not how they chose to do it.

Link gets eight seconds on the clock for every full heart he has. Fractions of a heart grant proportional time. While the game only displays health in quarter-hearts, Ocarina of Time actually tracks hearts in 16ths (each full heart is effectively 16 hit points), and each 8th of a heart grants Link one second on the timer.

So, what happens if Link has exactly 1/16th of a heart? The display rounds up, so it looks like Link has a quarter of a heart left, but he’s considerably closer to kicking the bucket than that. He has less health than what’s needed to get a one-second timer. How does the game cope with that?

It does it by just not starting a timer at all! If Link is almost dead, paradoxically, he becomes immune to fire and drowning timers. He’s still in great danger, for any attack on him in this state will kill him immediately, but it makes tunic-less challenge runs a bit more interesting.

Break Timers With Low Health (Youtube, 1 minute)

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

Ollie Reynolds at Nintendo Life reports on why the Deku Stick item in Link’s hands looks different between Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. It has to do with a subtle texture reference error.

Oli Welsh, demonstrating that there’s nothing good that can last, tells us that three Disco Elysium developers have left the company. Details are scarce, but it seems it was not by choice. Is it possible that there’s an NDA involved, or else, a non-disparagment clause?

At TechCrunch, Devin Coldewey claims that Stadia, Google’s streaming gaming service that they just finally killed, died because no one trusts them to keep anything alive. I still remember (and tend to repeatedly mention) how frustrated I was when they killed Google Reader back in 2013, in order to make way for a social networking service that no one remembers, and that feeling never really went away.

Kyle Orland at Ars Technica mentions a visual novel Spike Chunsoft is releasing for Switch that they’ve cancelled for Steam, due to mandated content changes by Valve. The game is called Chaos;Head Noah (their punctuation, not mine), and was originally released for the Xbox 360, with a Vita re-release, that both received very restrictive ratings. Later releases had an edited script which allowed it to be released with a lighter rating, which an anonymous source says is the version to be released on Switch (and not on Steam). Chaos;Head Noah is a sequel to the previous Chaos;Head, and both are part of the same series as Steins;Gate.

The mainstream gaming press suffered another blow. John Walker writing for Kotaku mentions that the ubiquitous Fandom wiki empire, formerly known as Wikia, has purchased a variety of other websites, including Gamespot, GameFAQs, and Giant Bomb, in addition to TV Guide, Metacritic, Cord Cutters News and Comic Vine. The NetHack Wiki changed over from Wikia many years ago, yet Fandom’s out-of-date version of it still confuses Google search results today. And it doesn’t feel great that so many properties have their primary source of knowledge about them owned by one business, which now engulfing a much larger percentage of the fan media landscape. I point you again to the line in our sidebar that says, “Just say no to Fandom.com!” And yet, if you want to find information on some things, Fandom sites are largely inescapable.

Marshall Honorof at Tom’s Hardware goes through the six English releases of Final Fantasy V and tells you which is the best to play-although, pointedly, it is challenging to buy these days. It contains a screed about game preservation that I am entirely on board with.

Video Games Chronicle’s Jordan Middler discusses a Bloomberg report that controversial Activision chief compliance officer Francis Townsend has stepped down, a former Bush administration officer who was unpopular with both fans and employees for not addressing reports of harassment.

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

It’s been a slow day at the news desk, blobs and blobbies. Just three items-

Mollie Taylor at PC Gamer tells us that Atlus is suing fans for reviving an old MMORPG of theirs, Shin Megami Tenshin Imagine Online. A particularly galling part of the article: “The suit claims the fan server has ’caused and will continue to cause irreparable damage to Atlus unless restrained by this Court,’ despite the servers being dead for over six years.” Not cool, Atlus! Of course, the law is complex, and very often on the internet the law being violated is not the one you think it is at first, be this seems particularly egregious.

Nintendo Life has an article by Gavin Lane on which Zelda title players should try first, and of course you just know I’d have to link it as an excuse to get in my two gelatinous cents! I really think people should try the original Legend of Zelda first! It’s hard, oooooh yes it is drebnar, and you’ll die a lot, but that’s what makes it fun! It’s not like you lose much when you die either. The article’s own argument (which you’ll have to read to get Gavin’s reasoning) is: Ocarina of Time, Link to the Past, Breath of the Wild, and Wind Waker.

And a group of writers headed by Rachel Watts at Rock Paper Shotgun report on their favorite indie titles from out of EGX 2022.

Finally, if I might talk about a non-gaming issue that affects all of us on the web… the U.S. Fifth Appeals Court has made a horrendous, head-scratching decision that could easily turn social media into a hailstorm of spam and misinformation, at best. The Atlantic has an article up called Is This The Beginning of the End of the Internet, and from what I’ve seen so far it’s possible? It all has to do with a Texas law that forbids social media from “censoring” people’s feeds, saying if they have 50 million users they no longer have First Amendment rights. Of course the law is complex (as I mentioned above), and the effects of this decision, if it isn’t overturned or outright nullified by an eventual law, will spill out in several directions. But those of us remembering the era leading up to the election of the Terrible Orange Man will remember the kinds of things that floated around Facebook at that time. This looks like it might open the already-leaky floodgates, and, at the very least, turn social media sites into unusable hellholes. For more, you probably should read the article-provided The Atlantic doesn’t ward it from your sight with a paywall. It’s nearly the end of the month, if you’re out of free articles they should reset soon. That’s the way it works, right?

(EDIT: Fixed link. The Windows clipboard continues to cause me problems, argh.)

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

Aaron Greenbaum at Den of Geek investigates, what was the last NES game released? Covers multiple territories, and both licensed and unlicensed titles, although in that later case recent releases stretch the premise considerably.

This might be our first link to comingsoon.net, reporting that Nintendo has purchased the studio that animated those charming Pikmin shorts from back in the Wii-U era. [Reminders: first, second, third] Maybe we should save those links for Sunday? Maybe we’ll just slip them in again some week.

We have a bit of animosity towards Cracked for how they treated several of their prior writers, although that did eventually result in the creation of both Behind The Bastards and Some More News, which are creator-owned. Still, bad scene Cracked. Currently working for them (for how long?) is Eli Yudin, and they wrote a list of 15 Gloriously Weird Genesis games. It contains ToeJam & Earl, Wiz & Liz, Rocket Knight Adventures, The Ooze, and Mutant League Football, among others.

At Stone Age Gamer they have a series about Game Boy sequels to NES games, and in that Chris Randazzo writes about Blaster Master Boy, which is really a Game Boy port of Robowarrior, which was originally known as Bomber King in Japan, where it was a spinoff of Bomberman! The source for that information: the dusty back corners of my beleaguered brain.

Callum Bains at TechRadar brings us news that a number of Bethesda and id Software games are playable for free, for a limited time, to people in the Xbox Insiders program.

Jody Macgregor at PC Gamer tells us that that fan remake of Ocarina of Time will get new features, including unlocked frame rate and adjustable difficulty.

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In past shows, TAS Bot has some off some pretty ridiculous sights, using something called Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). Essentially, using certain well-understood exploits, the runner (usually, but not always, a set of scripted inputs) writes a sequence of instructions into the machine’s RAM, and then transfers the code execution to that sequence, allowing for “arbitrary behavior,” meaning, almost anything that can be written into that RAM. TAS Bot at AGDQ 2014 wrote Pong into memory during a run of Super Mario World and ran it (6 minutes):

This technique has also been used to run a variant of Flappy Bird, and even a bona fide hex editor into the save RAM of Super Mario World, without even needing scripts, entirely by a human player. But this is beside the point.

In 2017, TASbot demolished the NES Classic, NES games and pulled off other very weird shenanigans (59 minutes).

There’s several of these videos, which I leave it to you to search out. They’re pretty easy to find on YouTube with the search terms “games done quick” and “tasbot”.

The point of this post is to bring you news of how players finally “obtained” the Triforce in Ocarina of Time after 23 years. The video of the show has yet to be uploaded to YouTube (it has been since I wrote this! scroll to the end), but until it shows up, Retro Game Mechanics EX has a video explaining how it was done (34 minutes):

SwankyBox has his own explainer video that’s 22 minutes. Of course, it’s all an elaborate show, but it runs on the Ocarina of Time beta cartridge found back in January of last year.

EDIT: Here it is, the whole 1-hour 13-minute epic!

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

Greetings to all humans down there on planet Glorb-III, also known as Earth. Let’s get started, drebnar!

A lament from Reddit on how Streetpasses are impossible to get now. If only Nintendo had thought to include them on the Switch. Probably it’ll take another ten years before they realize what a good idea they had.

Chris Moyse from Destructoid tells us this week’s Arcade Archives release is Taito’s Fighting Hawk!

Kate Gray from Nintendo Life writes about the thing that all video game journalists are someday destined by fate to write about: Earthbound. It’ll happen here too someday, you can rely upon it. And Alana Hauges frpm Nintendo Life has some words to say about its sequel Mother 3!

From Polygon, Michael McWhertor enthuses about how great is the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, Shredder’s Revenge.

Chris Friberg of Den of Geek tells us his picks for the 15 best NES RPGs. #1 is Dragon Quest III! (What do you mean, don’t spoil it? I’m an alien, I spoil everything drebnar!) He also ranks Wizardry pretty high, he has great taste!

Over on Hackaday, Robin Kearey tell us about a reimplementation of the classic Tamagotchi using modern hardware!

Blake Johnson of CBR.com asks if a collection of the DS Castlevania games could ever be released? While the fan favorite remains Symphony of the Night, the DS games are excellent and retain many of its greatest elements.

Go Nintendo’s rawmeatcowboy points to the discovered female Link art from Japanese guidebooks that History of Hyrule uncovered! Hey, that image looks familiar! Meanwhile, comicbook.com’s Connor Casey tells us that professional wrestlers Steve Austin and Cody Rhodes disagree as to which is the best Legend of Zelda game, respectively, Breath of the Wild or Ocarina of Time. This may be the only time in my entire life that I’ve agreed with the opinion of earthling Steve Austin, although admittedly I’m a unicellular organism filled with an iridescent goo.

And Jules Wang at Android Police tells us that Chromebooks should be getting better Android support later, improving their game-playing experience. Between that and Steam Support, who needs a Steam Deck? (Answer: ME I DO YES I WANT ONE PLEASE SEND IT TO MEEEEEE)

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

Bryan of Nintendo Everything brings us the words of the Mother 3 producer who thinks they know why it’s not been released in English: it has to do with the difficulty in bringing the special qualities of Shigesato Itoi’s prose to a language other than Japanese.

Gabe Gurwin of Gamespot thinks he knows why the Castlevania game reboot failed: the first one fit into the prior story but “frustrated” fans a bit, but the second one sucked. Eh.

Tom Nardi of hackaday brings us the experiences and pictures of Vintage Computer Festival East 2022.

One entire internet has been posting about Ocarina of Time remade in Unreal Engine with a 60fps frame rate. I am told that I should at least acknowledge this. I do so with Marc Deschamps’s mention on comicbook.com. It mentions the fact that Sora from Kingdom Hearts is playable.

Slightly more heartening is a report from Joseph Luster, writing for Crunchyroll, that two tactics games set in the R-Type universe are being remade.

Isaiah Colbert on Kotaku brings us news of Twitch’s plans for improving profits from streaming. Hint: they involve reducing the cut that streamers receive and even more ads! All problems solved! The streamers themselves don’t appear to be thrilled.

Tyler Fischer for comicbook tells us Square Enix plans of reviving the Fear Effect series.

And Lowell Bell on NintendoLife uses speculation about bringing them to Switch as their excuse to mention ten Western RPGs: Ultima (why only the original?), Diablo (it’s already got Diablos 2 and 3), Fallout (Wasteland 2 is there), Might & Magic VI (bring us Xeen!), Deus Ex, Morrowind, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, Neverwinter Nights 2, Dragon Age: Origins and Witcher II.

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