On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
The critical consensus on Ultima Underworld is that it was a high point of the Ultima franchise, a then-unique (and still fairly distinctive) kind of game, a 3D fantasy adventure released nine months before Doom, with a detailed dungeon and a high degree of player agency.
Ultima Underworld got a Playstation release, but only in Japan. It is not a straight upgrade from the DOS version, it’s got different cutscenes and anime character portraits, as well as interface differences. Still, it could well be worth playing for its own sake.
Often for these romhack posts I’ll try to apply the patch myself and take my own screenshots, but in this case the patch is over 120 megabytes, and itself to be applied to a CD game ISO, and a substantial game to learn and navigate in itself, so I’m going to pass this time and just use screenshots from the game’s romhacking.net entry.
Look at that anime-style character art. I guess this counts as the third JRPG post in a row.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Did you know there was a Parappa anime? It was released in around 2001, around the time Parappa the Rapper 2 for PS2 was released.
Parappa creator Rodney Greenblat said, in a Gamasutra interview in 2005, that other than character designs he wasn’t allowed to be involved with producing the anime. I it shows, especially with the focus on the new characters Matt and Paula. They feel like the writers included them because they wanted to write to their personalities, maybe because they didn’t want to step on the toes of the developers of the games by writing for their characters. It’s not an awful show, but it’s not what a Parappa show should have been.
An episode that ties in with the games a bit more than usual is Episode 13, which involves Parappa’s karate teacher Tamanagi-sensei, known to English speakers as Chop Chop Master Onion. He sounds a lot like he does in the game, even speaking Japanese, and it’s great to hear him get more lines.
The blog Get Info reveals some facts about Sony’s original game-playing videobox that are not well known! By weight, a lot of this blog is Nintendo stuff, so it’s nice to get some stuff up here about its competitor. They’re all revelations from the book Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Center by Phil Kunkel. I have no information if he’s related to The Game Doctor from Electronic Games magazine, Bill Kunkel, who passed away in 2011.
Have you seen one of these discolored from age? I don’t think I have.
The two most interesting facts: it was designed based on the Macintosh Plus, and its plastic case contains a bit of violet to counteract plastic discoloring over time. Oh, why couldn’t Nintendo have foreseen this with the case of the Super Nintendo, it really looks bad when its plastic changes color!
Warning: slightly NSFW for depiction of sheep birth.
You’re watching the video and it seems like standard 90s kids whimsy and then woah did that sheep just come out of its mother?
What are the Dazzeloids? They’re characters created by Rodney Alan Greenblat, the character designer of Parappa the Rapper! They were made for a multimedia Playstation game released in 1994, two years before Parappa. I call it a game, but it seems more to have been one of those early multimedia products that’s mostly video clips given a loose connecting story, only in Dazzeloids case, the clips are very weird. The Dazzeloids (not Dazzleoids, as you might expect) have as their mission the liberation of minds and use creativity as a tool to that end. It’s all very nineties kids TV. The Dazzeloids are very obscure now, and don’t even appear on Rodney’s website, which is kind of a shame.
Does Lammy wear Stinkabod merchandise?
All of the Dazzeloids have a dream sequence on the disk that introduces them and tells you what they’re like, and the video above is the one for Stinkabod the Sheep, who might be the character on Lammy’s shirt. The video is very weird, but engaging, and definitely a Rodney Greenblat creation. The characters are of the same style as Parappa, and it doesn’t seem impossible that Stinkabod and his friends could exist in the same world.
Rodney’s creations are a bit more popular in Japan than in the U.S., where Parappa got an anime series and a line of merchandise. While you’re diving down this internet rabbit hole, you might also check out Rodney Greenblat’s personal site Whimsyload!
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
I’m back! I’ve been bobbing and blobbing around internet slimepools and have dredged from their murky depths the latest gaming information for your consumption! Yum!
Engadget’s Kris Holt tells us that the graphic-based Steam version of Dwarf Fortress is on the way! It’ll cost $30, which it is possible to be dismayed by, except that if there’s any game that offers depth and content worth at least $30, it’s Dwarf Fortress. The version will have not only graphics but a tutorial and updated UI! And the free version will continue to be updated! Dwarf Fortress is going with a paid version because its creators, being not electronic dwarves but actual human being people, need money to live. Please, help them to live!
K. Thor Jensen for PC Magazine writes about what he considers the 10 worst arcade conversions of all. They cover a number of likely suspects. Atari 2600 Pac-Man, NES 720°, GBA Mortal Kombat, GBA Marble Madness, PC Thunder Blade, Amiga Street Fighter II, NES Ikari Warriors, 2600 Double Dragon, PS1 X-Men vs Street Fighter, and C64 Cisco Heat. But, I dunno, there are a lot of awful computer ports of arcade games floating around out there. Given the time I could probably redo the whole list, but PC Magazine isn’t paying me to do it. Plus, that kind of negativity is more the Gripe Monster’s lawn.
Ryan Dinsdale at IGN tells us that Microsoft loses from $100 to $200 on every Xbox X and S they sell. Aaahahaha! Yes my minions, exult with me in the misfortune of a major console manufacturer, for no good reason than sheer ill will! Er. Sorry, I let the evil out of my brain for a moment there.
At Kotaku, John Walker says that Playstation Plus has lost two million subscribers after its relaunch! Haahaha! Revel in their misfortune! Giant corporations will destroy the earth, at least they suffer very slightly every once in a great while! Oops, sorry again, I really need to get my bile gland emptied more often. The article mentions that the higher-priced tiers mean Sony is actually making more money now anyway.
The past two Sundays have been devoted to Playstation cutscenes. Here’s one more.
Pepsiman is an infamous Japan-only PS1 title, created by KID, who produced the NES games Low G Man and Recca. The Pepsiman character was a mascot for Pepsi in Japan. How he managed to swing a Playstation game I don’t know. I assume it was released as a cheap promotional thing, similar to how Sneak King for Xbox 360 was distributed for $4.99 at Burger King in the U.S., but truthfully I don’t know where I got that impression. It’s probably false.
It had a low budget, so they put in these cutscenes with an American actor sitting at home with what I can only describe as way too much Pepsi, drinking, congratulating the player (in English), and exhorting them to consume the caramel-colored, cloyingly-sweet beverage.
The effect is akin to having bubbles of carbon dioxide diffusing through your brain. Please spend time in a decompression chamber after viewing, to avoid coming down with the Pepsi Bends.
It’s Sunday! Time to electrocute your brain with more game-related video weirdness. Electrodes at the ready!
In Japan, it seems, Crash Bandicoot has a completely different, and extremely earwormy, theme song. Well in the Japanese release of Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, if you hold Left, Circle, L1, and L2 when the Playstation logo appears, you get this entertainingly bizarre karaoke video showing off a long version of the theme, featuring Crash doing a signature dance move, cavorting with ladies in nightgowns and bikinis, and getting blown up by a jetpack, all right and proper activities to be had by an anthropomorphic marsupial.
The song also featured in commercials for the games in Japan. As an extra, here is a (very badly compressed) compilation:
There’s a more video weirdness concerning Japanese Crash Bandicoot, but let’s save that for later….
Its Sunday! Another week in the books! You made it. So, here’s a weird video something you may enjoy.
On the original Playstation there were a lot of games release, some good, some bad, and some rather strange. Since games were released on CD, there was a lot of space for full-motion video, and sometimes that allowed developers to build in some silly extras.
That’s what happened with the Golden Nugget game, a fairly standard gambling sim that was elevated to sublime levels of wackiness by its video clips. It’s a fairly standard shoehorned-in story, about a computer chip that allows one to win games of chance somehow, but then Adam West shows up, as “Mr Swayne,” starts Adam West-ing, and suddenly, you’re watching comedy gold.
The news has been going around the web, but the first place we saw it was Nintendo Life, where Ollie Reynolds wrote about the trademark expiring for the Intellivision Amico. It’s looking increasingly likely that it’s just not going to come out.
Ed Nightingale at Eurogamer brings word that Twitch will soon allow streamers to identify their streams with custom tags, which I’m like, welcome to the entire rest of the galaxy for well over a decade? We here at Set Side B add tags to our posts quite profusely. It’s part of the major religion on my home planet, drebnar! “Thou shalt always add all the tags ye can think of to thine content,” Book of Shlorp, 12:2.
And at GamingBible in the UK, Mark Foster reveals that Sony has filed for a patent relating to using PS3 peripherials on the PS5. So, they’re patenting having their devices work with their own systems? That’s pretty cool, I guess. The implication of it is that Sony is moving forward on their plans to offer PS3 emulation. The patent doesn’t mention all the devices by name, but includes illustrations of a variety of gadgets including the EyeToy and the PSP Go.
At VentureBeat’s subsite GamesBeat, Dean Takahashi sadly reports that Bernie Stolar, former President at Sega of America, has passed away at the age of 75. Alana Hauges of NintendoLife notes that his early career was in co-op, before joining Atari and working on their Lynx portable system. Later at Sony, Stolar helped shepherd the Playstation and franchises such as Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, before leaving to help Sega launch the Dreamcast.
After going free-to-play, the player base of popular battle royale hit Fall Guys‘ has ballooned to 20 million! But Eric Van Allen at Destructoid tells us that there is some tension among long-time players over changes to its currency model. At GameRant, Rory Young has more, including an observation made by one of the players: under the new system, a player who loses five matches in the first round ends up making more than a player who wins a match after five rounds!
Space Bob vs The Replicons
Graham Smith at Rock Paper Shotgun tells tales of the 2018 indie game Space Bob vs The Replicons (Steam), described as like a 2D No Man’s Sky, but didn’t do well on its initial release. Its creator had a heart attack a week after it hit Steam, then left the games industry. But he’s back, and has announced a big update. Its developer is Intravenous Software, and they’re on Twitter!
Rodney Greenblat, famously the creator of the video style behind Parappa the Rapper and the criminally underrated UmJammer Lammy, has a new YouTube account, on which he’s been posting various interesting and fun things, including short interviews with the characters from around when UmJammer Lammy was new, as well as pre-production cutscenes with a completely different design for Lammy! Whaaa?? Have a look!
