TToOVG is the initialism I’m trying out for Drew Mackey’s blog Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, and they have an excellent post up about Mario’s death animation, in fact the death animation of lots of platformer characters, where the fall off the screen.
They turn to face the player, as if acknowledging for the first time that there’s a space alongside the strictly 2D in-profile world through which he traveled before the Nintendo 64 existed, and leaps out like an ant escaping an ant farm. Like this:
Image from linked blog (there, however, it’s animated)
Mario isn’t the only character to die this way. Other faller-deathers include Milon, the Doki Doki Panickers, Wonder Boy, Master Higgins, the Mice Mickey and Minnie, Little Nemo, Kid Dracula, Kirby, Sonic the Hedgehog, and even Scrooge McDuck, who really should be able to afford a more unique animation.
Think about how odd it is that so many games use this leaping out of the screen idea, and that we rarely question it. Then go read the post, where they interrogate the idea even further.
Kid Fenris is an underrated little classic game review blog. Many of their posts deserve to be linked to, but we try to keep up a variety of sources, so I try to pick out when they have particularly interesting subject matter. So it is when they posted about McDonald’s Treasure Island for the Genesis/MegaDrive, which also turns out to be the first game Treasure developed as a company.
Image from the linked article. It may be a licensed game, but it looks so vibrant!
As the article reminds us, it wasn’t the first Treasure game released, that would be the game that in many ways announced to the world that they meant business: Gunstar Heroes, as brimming with ideas as it was.
Treasure seems largely to be in preservation mode these days, and their last title was released 11 years ago. Not all of their games have been as critically acclaimed as Gunstar Heroes, but they all have something interesting about them, and McDonald’s Treasure (heh) Island has it too.
Some weeks ago I linked to a Wolfenstein 3D-like shooter by jimo9757 with a rendering engine implemented entirely in PETSCII, the only kind of graphics a Commodore PET, their first computer, was capable of producing. It was pretty shocking to see it in action, even if the best-looking version of it was the one made for a Commodore 64.
Well, here’s another video shenanigan along those lines, a platformer, one styled much like Super Mario Bros., also implemented with PETSCII graphics, and also from jimo9757. First the PET version (15 minutes, all eight levels), then the one made for the Commander X16 (3 minutes, a demonstration):
While other retro computer systems had their own distinctive fonts, including MS-DOS’s nigh-legendary code page 437, I think PETSCII is among the best. The PET could only do graphics at all using it, but it had quite a lot of foresight put into its character set. Among its characters are are seven different heights and widths of solid block, diagonal lines, balls, slopes, playing card symbols, box drawing borders of two different types, enough corners to make for decent low-res images, and reverse video versions of all of the above. Later 8-bit Commodore computers didn’t have to use PETSCII for graphics, but its presence made for a good baseline for amateur programmers without having to start messing around with POKEs (which every other kind of graphics on a C64 or VIC-20 required).
We’re on UFO 50 kick here, there’s so many nice games in there, and of such a wide variety. And that starts right off with the first game in the set, Barbuta, a simple but mysterious platformer.
I suggest walking one tile to the right, then immediately restarting the game. You’ll see why.
Barbuta is made in an old school style, and it’s rough, although short. You get seven lives, instead of the one a really old game might give you, but there are no continues. The very first screen contains a death trap. It’s the kind that you won’t fall for more than once, but it teaches an important lesson: pay attention to the terrain. Anything that looks unusual, different from its surroundings, could be important, or deadly.
Rather than tell you of my findings, which might not be too useful since, while I’ve gotten some ways in, I haven’t finished it yet, I present a Youtube walkthrough from sylvie (32 minues). If you just need a nudge you could just watch a few minutes, until you find something that gets you unstuck. That’s my recommendation, anyway.
Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series is one of the best explainers of the quirks of NES games on Youtube. It’s not afraid to dive into the assembly code itself if need be, but its videos can often be understood by people without deep technical backgrounds.
Watch the video for the full spiel, but here’s a summary.
Once upon a time, in the waning days of the Famicom, Konami planned to release a game called Arc Hound in Japan. It was going to be another of their trademark run-and-gun shooters, along the lines of Contra. It even received coverage in enthusiast magazines in Japan, and it probably would have used one of Konami’s bespoke mapper chips like the VRC6 that the Japanese version of Castlevania III used.
Arc Hound was likely far into development when the decision was made to not release it in the Japanese market. Producing a game cartridge requires a substantial investment in parts and marketing, of course, and they must have judged that they couldn’t make enough of a profit off of it in their home territory: the Super Famicom was already out, as well as Contra III on that platform. But the NES still had a little bit of life left in it in the US, so they decided to give the game a shot over here, as a title in the Contra series
A big problem there was Nintendo’s policies towards manufacturing NES games. Nintendo demanded the right to build all the licensed software for the NES, and further restricted most (although not all) publishers to using Nintendo’s own family of mappers. Konami had been forced to revise their games to use Nintendo’s mappers in other games: Castlevania III famously used a different mapper in Japan, one that offered greatly expanded sound capabilities that worked through the Famicom’s sound channel pass-through, but was incompatible with the NES.
Extra sound channels are nice, but the primary use for most mapper chips is bank switching, swapping different sections of a cartridge’s data into the Famicom/NES’s 6502-workalike’s 64K address space, and also potentially making different sections of the game’s graphics data visible to the PPU graphics chip.
Behind the Code’s examination of the game program reveals that a large portion of the time of each frame is spent in setting up bank switches. Whether it was coded poorly, or just that Konami didn’t want to pay to include a mapper with more a more efficient bank switching mechanism, the game wastes a lot of time just pulling in different banks of data to be visible to the NES’s hardware. So it is that Contra Force could have run a lot better, but Konami either didn’t want to expend the coding effort, or pay for the the mapping hardware, to allow it to do so.
Presumably, somewhere in Konami’s archives, there is a version of Arc Hound that uses a VRC chip to handle mapping, and that runs much more smoothly. Maybe someday it’ll come to light, although I wouldn’t lay any bets on it. More likely perhaps is that someone will hack up the code and make such a version themselves. Who knows?
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
It’s not FrogFind, which is an web search engine with a retro-computing theme run by the person behind Action Retro.
No, this one’s a charming and free action game from itch.io. It’s a lot like a platformer, but not quite completely one, because you never land on any platforms. Once you leave the ground, it’s up to you to guide your tiny friend to eat every fly on the level before they touch the ground again. Each fly gives the frog a burst of height, like they’re bouncing off of them. It’s satisfying to collect every fly on one pass, bouncing off of each one like a little amphibious pinball.
There’s some leeway you’re granted. They frog can hit ceilings without danger; they won’t collide but will just fall from there. Sometimes you can hit walls, although sometimes they’ll result in failure. Retrying is instantaneous though.
As you progress, the game introduces new elements. “Empty” flies only appear and become snackable once all the other flies have been nom’d. Flies with a dot on them must be eaten twice; they become edible again after any other fly has been eaten. Skate rails (the itty bitty froggy can shred, it seems) give the frog a place to grind safely for a while, and can be used sometimes to get around barriers or return to heights to get more flies. There’s bouncing spots the frog can hop endless on too.
There’s 48 levels in the game, three of them tutorial levels and then nine levels in each of five worlds. After they’ve all been cleared and the frog has enough food for winter, you begin to unlock harder “B-side” levels, which introduce new tricks.
The aesthetic is laidback, and the music is quiet contemplative, somewhat in contrast with the frog’s acrobatic feats. So help a frog out! Winter is coming!
Frogfall (by Kultisti, for Windows, on itch.i0, $0)
Here’s video of a playthrough of the main game. Note that, while it does show the ending, it doesn’t show any of the B-side levels.
This late-appearing board is aptly named: “that level”
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
It’s a fun idea, to determine if you, as a physical human being person, with all your physical human being person needs, could survive in the world of Super Mario 64, were you somehow to be transported there permanently.
The video embedded and linked below, from a Youtuber named Pretzel, is the projected beginning of a series about whether you could survive in different game worlds. Games are abstractions, and play life in them often leaves out details like drinking, eating, or (let’s face it) pooping. By ignoring that and trying to look at them as if they were actual places you are, by definition, engaging in pedantry, ignoring the essential nature of these places. But it’s fun to think about somewhat. At least we know this world has cake!
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Super Mario Maker. Not the one for Switch, with the Master Sword power up and Superball Flower and the like. The one for WiiU, with all the Amibo characters and that formerly had the website listing all the levels, that Nintendo took down because it is a company of good and bad, and for them software preservation is among the worst.
Super Mario Maker survives, for now, but its online services will be shut down in April, removing the vast swath of levels that players made for the software, because Nintendo can’t be assèd to preserve it. That sucks epically, gigantically, humongously, brobdingnagianly. But it’s Nintendo. They always do what they want, heedless of the opinion of others, and as I said, that’s both good and bad.
Remember Super Mario Maker? Most players used it to construct hyper-lethal deathtraps, literal abattoirs of Marios. (Tip: don’t Google image search the word “abattoir.”) Sure, I tried constructing reasonable levels of fair situations, but saying that online is like claiming I don’t watch television: it sounds pretentious. In practice everyone made at least one Smiling Hellscape, and yes I did make at least a couple.
But on the other hand there is speedrun culture, who attempts to overcome any challenge in a game no matter how ridiculous. In order to upload your level to the SMM servers, you have to complete it. That means it must be completable, even if it’s ludicrously unfair. In addition to the usual kaizo gauntlets, some players created levels that rely on prior knowledge to finish, and tackling one of those if you don’t have that information can be Promethean exercise in trial and error, emphasis on the trial.
That brings us to the Discord server of Team 0% (invite link). There mission: to show every level created for Super Mario Maker some love, and by love I mean, at least one completion, before the servers go dark for bad in a month’s time. SMM helps out by offering to give players uncompleted levels. And so they play on, no challenge to great, no gimmick too obscure. Recently they finished every level made in the year 2019. And they’re down to their last 1,000 levels overall!
One month to go. 1,000 levels to finish. Can they do it? They finished 1,000 levels back in the first week of their project, so it’s definitely possible. We’re watching them on their epic quest, and wish them luck. The good kind!
Here is a talk by the creator of the brilliant 8-bit platforming game Jumpman (who isn’t Mario). That’s all the lead-in I have time to provide right now. And if you get the chance to try Jumpman, do it. There’s a version on Steam! (Note, the C64 version is preferable to the DOS version.)
The Man Behind Jumpman: Retro Gaming Revealed (Youtube, 58 minutes)
