I had a different post ready to go today, but it’s been delayed by a few days for unavoidable reasons, so let’s do another Nintendo obscurity video, this time for things that can be found “out of bounds.” There’s several interesting cases mentioned and shown off here in this video from Nintendo Unity. It’s 11 minutes long.
Some of cases shown:
In Punch-Out!! on the Wii, off-camera, Piston Hondo is reading a Sailor Moon manga in a between-round cutscene.
On the original Pikmin’s title menu, the name of the menu programmer is off-camera to the left.
There’s a cartoon drawing of a Goomba as a texture beneath Pinna Park in Super Mario Sunshine. This has been given the name “Kug,” and there’s more information on it on Supper Mario Broth and The Cutting Room Floor.
Noki Bay in Sunshine has a model of a book locked in an unreachable area. There’s more info on it on The Cutting Room Floor.
This one’s relatively well known: the trophy of Princess Daisy in Super Smash Bros. Melee has a texturing error that gives her a third eye, hidden beneath her hair on the back of her head. The trophy for Meta Ridley also has a hidden heart texture inside of it.
In Earthbound, if you can clip outside of the terrain in the upper-right corner of Onett, you can reach the ultimate upper-right corner of the whole map. (All of the areas in Earthbound are connected on a single huge map!) Interacting with the corner there can access a debug menu left in the game.
There’s a secret control room beneath the island in Donkey Kong 64.
Another well known glitch, the video mentions the glitch that lets Samus get inside the level terrain in Metroid by rolling into a ball and coming out of it repeatedly while a closed door surrounds her. This is the means by which people can get to the glitchy “secret worlds” mentioned in an early issue of the Nintendo Fun Club News.
At the end, the video reminds of the “Minus World” glitch in NES Super Mario Bros.
Despite the words’ lack in the title, the two videos linked here, both made by Some Body, are all about roguelike behavior, and likely have implications for Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon engine generally, from which the Rescue Games derive.
In terms of depth, this post is rated 4 out of 5: highly detailed information for obsessed fans and game designers.
And, the second (44m), it goes further into the weeds and is longer:
So, here’s a tl;dw overview of the first video. Despite the length, this is really only a brief summary! Some Body got their information by reverse engineering the games’ code, so it should be considered authoritative.
PMD has three times of actions, moving, attacking and using items. First they try to use an item–if there is no item to use, or the situation isn’t appropriate, or there’s a random component and they choose not to, they fall through to attacking. If there’s no one appropriate to attack, they fall through to moving or wandering. If they’re not pursuing a target and aren’t wandering, they wait in place.
Awake Pokemon try to reach a target: team members try to reach the leader (you)*, enemies try to reach a party member of yours. If they are following someone, they try to reach the target by default moving diagonally before moving orthogonally. This is good to know, and an effective strategy, since it’s harder to escape a cardinal-adjacent Pokemon than a diagonal-adjacent one. If a Pokemon has a target in sight but can’t move towards towards it, it doesn’t move.
(* Note: for teammates, this assumes the “Let’s Go Together” tactic is in effect. Generally, tactics settings are covered in the second video.)
No Pokemon can move towards a target they can’t see. Sight in Blue & Red Rescue Team is two spaces around them, or throughout a lit room they are in plus one space into corridors. Of course, invisible targets can’t be seen, even if they’re nearby. Note, a quirk of the Mystery Dungeon series generally: when standing in the first space of a corridor, you can only see slightly into the room, but everyone in the room can see you. While your default sight range in darkness is two spaces in the PMD1 games, instead of MD’s standard 1 space, you’re still a bit blind when moving into rooms. Notably, that two space distance around you is a square, so in corridors with bends in them you get a bit extra sight distance.
Now comes the interesting part (to people who are as obsessed with roguelikes as I am): what happens if a Pokemon loses sight of its target? In PMD1, it considers the last four locations the Pokemon was in, and tries to go to the one it was visible in most recently. Note in bent corridors, it becomes harder for a character to lose its target.
If the target is four turns outside of the follower’s sight, it has lost track of it, and the follower begins wandering randomly. This can happen if the Pokemon has never had a target (none has come into sight), or the target or follower teleports, the target moves over terrain the follower cannot cross, or the target moves away when the follower is occupied, or, due to the variety of events that can happen in the Mystery Dungeons, other ways.
Followers without targets wander randomly. When they spot a target, they cease moving randomly and pursue it. But if still wandering, in rooms, they pick a random exit, go to it and go down the corridor. In a corridor, they follow it until they reach a room (then entering it), or they reach an intersection. At an intersection, we see an interesting behavior: PMD1 occured before Chunsoft switched over to making wanderering monsters pick random directions at corridor intersections! In later Mystery Dungeon games, including later Pokemon Mystery Dungeons, wandering monsters go straight in intersections if they can. This is behavior that can be relied upon, but not in PMD1.
Outmatched Pokemon can decide to flee, essentially, moving away from their targets instead of towards. In rooms, they pick the exit furthermost from their pursuer, unless they moves them towards that pursuer; then they just try to get away as best they can, likely remaining in the room. A quirk of this: sometimes a fleeing monster breaks for an an exit that is more distant from the target, but not away from at attacker, giving it a free hit. The circumstances around this are complicated: the explanation begins at 7:16 in the first video.
For attacking, Pokemon have up to four moves, and a normal “attack.” This generic attack is not part of the main Pokemon game series. It was present in the first two PMD games, but after that became less effective. In the fourth and fifth PMD games, the normal attack only does five points of damage, and in the Switch remake of Rescue Team, it does no damage at all; it’s only a tool for passing time. But we’re still in the realm of PMD1, where “normal attacks” are not only useful but frequently used, because they don’t consume any PP.
Attacks are chosen based on a weighted average of all the usable moves. Each move has its own weight value; the normal attack weight’s varies according to the number of other moves available.
Ranged attacks are an interesting case. If a Pokemon has a ranged attack, and an enemy that can be attacked at a distance, it triggers the attack routine, where it picks a move from those available, but then only actually performs the move if the attack can reach its target. This can result in an attacker passing up opportunities to attack while an opponent approaches it. Out of fairness, room-range attack moves are only used by the AI when adjacent to an enemy.
Items have a bunch of minutiae associated with their use by the AI, but a lot of it is pretty ordinary. A few highlights: teammates can throw held negative status equipment at enemies, wild Pokemon start using items at Level 16, and there is only one Orb that wild Pokemon can use, and teammates can’t use it: the Rollcall Orb, for them, summons a number of other wild Pokemon into adjacency with them.
I am SO ENVIOUS. Kit & Krysta, formerly of the official Switch video podcast Nintendo Minute, currently of their own projects and Youtube channel, got cell phone video of an amazing place, a location in Tokyo somewhere that gamedevs sometimes meet at, and is crammed tightly with game memorabilia. It’s almost a museum all to itself, and unlike the Nintendo Museum, seems like they don’t mind video footage escaping their confines, although on the other hand this doesn’t seem to be open to the public. It doesn’t look like a lot of people could fit in there at once, anyway!
I usually steer well clear of the hard sell, or “prompt for engagement,” when it comes to asking you to follow links and view videos from here. I figure if you’re interested you’ll click through, and if you’re not, then maybe tomorrow. But I’m breaking through that reserve just this once, as this place is amazing. You really have to see this if you have any interest in Nintendo, APE, Pokemon, Dragon Quest or their histories (12 minutes):
Obsession is simultaneously a wonderful and a terrible thing. Wonderful to behold from outside, awful to experience from within.
What kind of obsession produces an effort, not just to complete Pokemon Platinum, which after all was sold to kids with the expectation that they would be able to beat it eventually. No, what about an effort to finish every possible game of Pokemon Platinum, using a script that works on every possible random seed, of over four billion, that the game can generate? And also operates mostly on “Nuzlocke Challenge” constraints, where any defeated Pokemon (here, after the first battle) have to be released? But that’s okay, because after that first fight, the player is never defeated?
That this is possible at all is because of Pokemon Platinum’s use of a PRNG, a pseudo-random number generator. While figuring out how, mathematically, to beat over four billion possible games is a formidable challenge, it’s still better than beating every possible conceivable random sequence of events, which can’t ever be done conclusively.
So, that’s what MartSnack did. They found out how to swim through the deep-yet-discrete sea of probability to obtain just the Pokemon, and Pokemon stats, they needed to complete the game, regardless of any random event the game could throw at them, with the same sequence of button presses. It’s a journey that requires frequent synchronization, to make sure no one possible play breaks free of the others, sending that branch of fate down a rogue path. How is this possible at all, I leave it to you to discover in their Youtube video, an interesting hour and five minutes found by MeFi user (and former owner) cortex, here:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
If you’re familiar with Pokemon creatures, you might understand this sequence of four short animations from NCHProductions a little better, but really, it won’t be that helpful. They’re weird, but fun, but weird. They relate a sequence of events, which I say because I can’t bring myself to call it a story.
#1: Eevee Tries a Lemon (1 minute)
#2: Eevee Disassembles a Magnemite (2 minutes)
#3: Magmemites (who are also bodybuilders for some reason) evolves into Magneton, and also Umbreon’s there (1 1/2 minutes)
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.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Let’s make it quick this week-
Oli Welsh at Polygon tells us what we already knew, that No Zelda Game is Closer to Breath of the Wild Than The 1986 Original. We can’t recommend it whole-heartedly though because it gets in some digs on the older game, saying it’s nowhere near as much fun as Link to the Past, a statement I disagree with.
Hope Bellingham at GamesRadar tells us that U.S. Customs wrecked a sealed-in-box copy of Pokemon Yellow valued at over $10,000. I rather disagree with that valuation too. I thought all the misguided young people were losing their money in crypto these days? (Note: GamesRadar is one of those sites that waits until you start reading an article then puts up a blocking box begging you to subscribe. Hint to GamesRadar: NO, and if I were interested in subscribing my generous impulse would have been destroyed by your prompt!)
Image from The Guardian, probably ultimately from a promotional photograph
At the Guardian, the very British-named Oliver Wainwright reviews Super Mario World, not the game but the theme park in California, a part of Universal Studios Hollywood. The verdict: 8/10, good graphics, some replay value. I’ve been in a melancholy frame of mind as of late, so seeing those brightly-painted dioramas makes me wonder what they’ll look like in twenty years, when Universal Studios’ attentions have drifted to another big thing. Nothing ages quite as badly as a happy prop painted in primary colors.
Casey Baseel at Soranews24 reports that the city of Yokohama in Japan has Pokémon-themed mailboxes! The article tells us that, in Japan, while there is home delivery of mail, pickup is only at public locations like post offices and mailboxes. It’s those mailboxes that have the characters affixed to them. Because we can’t resist spoiling things, the Pokémon present are Pikachu (as seen above), Eevee, and Piplup. The article has more information, including detailed information on where to find them if you’re in Yokohama!
The Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games are interesting offshoots of the mainline Mystery Dungeon titles. They make clear a stark difference between primacy and popularity: if you only care about sales, then there is no question that Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games are the main games, because their sales vastly outweigh the other games. The games in the second generation, Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky, are the best-selling Mystery Dungeon games of all. You have to know that there’s around 30 other games, many much older than the Pokemon flavor, in fact older than Pokemon itself by three years, to know the whole story.
Yet the PMD games are still Mystery Dungeon titles, and they play very similarly. They’re graphical roguelike dungeon-crawl games, just, you, your teammates, and your opponents are not generic fantasy creatures, but Pokemon. That is, specific fantasy creatures. Trademarked ones, in fact.
Because PMD’s fairly popular, you’re more likely to find investigations into its internals than the Shiren or other Mystery Dungeon games, just from the number of people who exist in its audience with both the will and skill to investigate. Yet, those internals are close enough to the MD standard that they even provide insight into how classic Mystery Dungeon operates.
YouPotato TheZZAZGlitch’s usualy video stomping grounds in Pokemon, but they have a fondness for PMD, so they’ve made a video on how the first generation (Red/Blue Rescue Team) generates its dungeons, and what do you know, many of these floor types are also very familiar to me from my time exploring the Shiren games, and it doesn’t seem a stretch at all to presume they’re run by the same, or at least a very similar, algorithm.
Do You Know Gaming’s subseries Region Lock has turned up a number of Pokemon games that they made for Sega systems in Japan! The Pico and Advanced Pico Beena systems were home to a few edutainment titles that taught through a variety of minigames. With no actual Pokemon gameplay, these titles are mostly curiosities today, but they are curious ones! Curious curiosities!
It’s pretty light as far as videos go, and more than a little click-bait-y, but it does show off some extremely obscure software.
From the depths of Mastodon, in that land of elephant people, four years ago josef posted a brilliant combination of a Beatles classic with some 8-bit Pokeflair. While the video seems gone from its initial upload, he reposted it on YouTube, which is what is embedded above.
