Tag: retro

Thrilling Tales of Old Videogames: FF vs D&D

Thrilling Tales of Old Videogames is one of the better game-related blogs out there, and their new post on how freely the first Final Fantasy cribbed from Dungeons & Dragons, and how that’s affected later games that have had to reckon with the changing legal landscape, is pretty darn interesting.

One of the facts represented is that, while D&D has always borrowed heavily from myth and literature for its beasties, Hasbro considers certain specific monsters to be their property, because they were created out of whole cloth, or at least heavily-obfuscated cloth. Obfuscated enough cloth. They link to a post on the blog Prismatic Wasteland that lists them all out with commentary: Beholder, Gauth, Carrion Crawler, Tanar’ri, Baatezu, Displacer Beast, Githyanki, Githzerai, Mindflayer and its alternate name Illithid, Umber Hulk and Yuan-Ti. These are considered “product identity” monsters, and other products should not use them under penalty of lawsuit. “Tanar’ri” and “Baatezu” are hilarious as identity-monsters, because they were only named that so TSR could excise the words “devil” and “demon” from their game in deference to the 80s Satanic Panic.

I urge you to follow that link too, as it’s an informative read itself. I personally can add that a definition for a Beholder has been in the source code for Nethack since 3.2 (nethackwiki), but is set to never be generated in the game, possibly waiting for an age where its actualization would be less legally fraught. (I’ve included the game info for Beholder at the end of this post.)

So let’s RTS (“ReTurn from Subroutine“) and get back to today’s subject, the Thrilling Tales post. A lot of the monsters mentions got revisions in later Final Fantasy games, and even in remakes of FF1. Even in the NES version if Final Fantasy, the Beholder became the Evil Eye, which is a legally-distinct giant oculus-monster.

FF1J’s Beholder, compared to the Evil Eye from one of the English ports. While it should be recognized that the Evil Eye here has much greater color depth, since it came from a remake, I think the design is generally better. The Beholder’s wide toothy smile isn’t as becoming for an alien eye-creature. (Images are from [ugh] the Fandom Final Fantasy wiki.)

Rather than interrogate their whole post, I think you should just go read it yourself. Go, go! I’ll be here when you get back, just, tomorrow.

nethackwiki’s sidebar for the Beholder, including its source code reference

Entertaining Bits of the Arcade Manual of Wizard of Wor

Lots of arcade machines have boring manuals, full of schematics, operator settings and assembly instructions, and nothing else. The manual for Bally/Midway’s Wizard of Wor machine has some other information, including a fairly complete play description including inner details of how the monsters are generated and how levels get harder, and a listing of all the phrases the game’s voice synth uses during play.

Wizard of Wor

There was recently an upload of 2,000 arcade manuals to the Internet Archive (as reported by Jason Scott on his Bluesky account, although he’s also on Mastodon, twice apparently), and that’s where I found the manual for Wizard of Wor.

Some quotes (italics are mine):

“When you have reached dungeons eight and above, you have become a Worlord. Now you have the honor of testing your skill in the Worlord dungeons. These dungeons are much tougher, there are fewer walls and more open spaces. If even one shot misses, and travels the long distance down to the opposite wall, a monster wiii very likely come up and gobble you down. Finding and establishing yourself in solid strategic positions is very difficult. It is easy to have several worriors chomped up in a row. Sometimes the monsters will line up along one edge of the maze — a lovely parade. However, if just one monster starts approaching from the top, watch out!” (page 11)

“The Wizard of Wor loves to hear the patter of little feet running through his dungeons. So he created some lovely beasties, known as Worlings. Burwor is beautiful, bouncing blue. Six of them exist on each dungeon level. They always remain visible. This is because the Wizards favorite color is blue. As each Burwor is shot, a Garwor may come to take his place. Garwor is kind of overfed, and waddles a bit, but he has yellow scales that are just delicate. As Garwors are shot, Thorwors are teleported in to take their place. Thorwor is sleek and dangerous red.” (page 11)

“The Wizard of Wor: Even at a young age, the Wizard showed promise in the mystic arts. But it took many dangerous encounters and many years of research and study to sharpen his skills to his current high level. Over the centuries, the Wizard has retained his chaotic sense of humor, much to the chagrin of worriors entering his dungeons (see the list of phrases).” (page 12)

And some of the phrases spoken by the Wizard during the game, spoken by the synth:

  • “Hey! Insert Coin!”
  • “Another coin for my treasure chest.”
  • “Ah good! My pets were getting hungry. Ha ha ha ha!”
  • “You’re off to see the Wizard, the magical Wizard of Wor.”
  • “Remember, I’m the wizard, not you.”
  • “If you can’t beat the rest, then you’ll never get the best! Ha ha ha ha!” (The Wizard laughs a lot.)
  • “If you destroy my babies, l’ll pop you in the oven! На һа һа һа!”
  • “Wasn’t that lightning bolt delicious? Ha ha ha ha!”
  • “Hey! Your space boot’s untied! Ha ha ha ha!”
  • “The Wizard of Wor thanks you.” (aww)

Rampart Again

Perhaps it’s a bit self-indulgent, but I’ve found a playthrough by someone other than me of the arcade version of Rampart, and decided to spotlight it. It’s a game that seems fondly remembered by some, and doesn’t seem to have sold badly. It has a baker’s dozen ports for a wide array of consoles. But no one, besides me, seems to talk about it any more, and until this video I was the only person of whom I have knowledge of completing the arcade version.

Even the MAME people needed my help to correct a game-breaking bug in the Rampart driver, because no one on the project could play Rampart well enough to get to that level. I don’t say this out of pride, but rather of sorrow. Other than its creators, I am probably the person in the world who knows the most about it. For more info, I point you to our Rampart tag.

On the video, there are caveats. The first one is I didn’t exactly it, but instead, Youtube’s vaunted algorithm has filed to hide it from me, because it’s six years old yet my searches haven’t turned it up to me until now. Sometimes I wish Google would stop showing me things it thinks I’d like and instead for a change found something I’ve explicitly asked it for.

Second, it’s by a Japanese speaker, of the Japanese version of Rampart. That was a two-player maximum version with joysticks, and from watching it, I can tell you it’s much easier than US Rampart. The player gets more time to rebuild, levels are easier to pass, grunts are less aggressive, and the game doesn’t pour on the Flagships, the red ships, with anywhere near as much energy in the last two levels. They manage to finish the game in one credit, something I’ve never done on the US version, but I strongly suspect I could do it too on that version, and fairly easily.

Still, it’s someone other than me who has a complete game on Youtube, in however many credits. It’s played on arcade hardware too, which I haven’t been able to do since Rampart was at our local arcade, back when that place existed, around 1991 or 1992. Here is that play (57 minutes):

I really don’t want to detract from their game, bit I’m a bit disappointed. I’ve played Rampart, mostly in MAME but sometimes on the Gamecube version of Midway Arcade Treasures, and on one particular DragonCon I played the PS3 version (there’s something of a story there). Every time, I’ve had to fight against bad luck and the most diabolical impulses of designers john Salwitz and Dave Ralston. Sometimes I win and sometimes I lose, but, ever, only I care.

The search for other people who have finished the US version of arcade Rampart continues.

Late addition: I have more discoveries to offer on this matter, but I have to figure some things out first. To be continued….

Romhack Thursday: NES Tecmo Super Bowl 2024

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

There’s a whole community out there that exists to update old console sports games with current rosters and stats. This isn’t the first time we’ve linked to one of these hacks, but it’s been a while, so why not? This one’s a recently-released hack updating NES Tecmo Super Bowl for the 2024 NFL season.

This faked cover art is from sblueman.com.

The site sblueman.com is the canonical host of many of these hacks, going back to 2017. There’s also hacks that simulate NCAA seasons, for those who prefer a more collegiate experience. The hacks can also be gotten from tecmobowl.org. You can also find there TSBTool, a rom editor that’s used to construct the hacks. More information on that process is at sblueman.com’s site at this page.

These fan-made edits don’t just change the numbers and names, but modify and attempt to improve the gameplay in many ways. Knowing that not everyone might agree with all of their choices, there’s four versions of the hack: a “base” version with the updated rosters and the most agreed-on changes, a “vanilla” version with more changes and is intended for casual players, a “hardtype” hack that increases the difficulty, and an slightly changed edition of hardtype where, during road games, the player actually plays as Player 2, against a Player 1 computer opponent. This is done to put them on the right side of the field, but as a side effect you have to play on the second controller (virtual or otherwise).

The Tecmo Bowl games are revered among retro game fans for their exciting action and design, but due to EA’s stranglehold on official licenses for most of the big league sports, official rereleases and remakes from Koei Tecmo are unlikely any time soon. These fan-made editions are twice-damned: by Tecmo’s ancient copyright, and EA’s slightly younger licensing deal. It’s money left on the table, and if you need any proof of capitalism’s manifest faults, there you go. Instead, according to tecmobowl.org, Tecmo had plans once to make a Pokemon Go clone called Tecmo Bo Go. That effort seems to have almost entirely vanished, except for that post and a couple of others, so it seems to have spun down the great internet commode.

Ancient Roguelike Lore: 50 Ways To Leave Your Game

Boudewijn Wayers was the creator of the very first Nethack Home Page. I have no idea where he is now, but he’s listed among the alumni of the Nethack Dev Team.

He wrote a spoiler for Nethack called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game, which was a cataloging of ways to die in that game. This used to be available in several locations on the World Wide Web, but now I can only find it in one place. To help preserve it for later generations, I paste it below in full.

I feel that first I should say a word about how Nethack pages have become scarce lately. The old Steelypips spoiler site is still active, but many of the other sites it links to have perished. (Some of them have academic URLs, and have probably fallen victim to the declining web investment of universities. To think in my lifetime I’ve seen the rise and subsequent abandonment of the internet as a tool of knowledge. I blame social media!)

I should see about preserving old spoiler documents on the living internet, but until I get something put together, here is Boudewijn Wayers’ list of ways to die in Nethack.

50 ways to leave your game
============================
by Boudewijn Wayers (kroisos@win.tue.nl).

There has been talk on the net lately about various ways to get killed.
Well, apart from being killed by a monster hitting you, there are lots
of other ways… Some of these other things you can be killed by are
mentioned here (I don’t claim to have noticed them all, but I think I
did):

a blast of acid
a blast of disintegration
a blast of fire
a blast of frost
a blast of lightning
a blast of missiles
a blast of poison gas
a blast of sleep gas
a bolt of cold
a bolt of fire
a bolt of lightning
a burst of flame
a carnivorous bag
a closing drawbridge
a cockatrice corpse
a collapsing drawbridge
a cone of cold
a contact-poisoned spellbook
a contaminated potion
a cursed throne
a death ray
a falling drawbridge
a falling object
a falling rock
a finger of death
a fireball
a genocide spell
a land mine
a magic missile
a magical explosion
a mildly contaminated potion
a potion of holy water
a potion of unholy water
a psychic blast
a residual undead turning effect
a scroll of fire
a scroll of genocide
a sleep ray
a system shock
a thrown potion
a touch of death
a tower of flame
a wand
acid
an alchemic blast
an electric chair
an electric shock
an exploding chest
an exploding crystal ball
an exploding drawbridge
an exploding item being destroyed
an exploding ring
an exploding rune
an exploding wand
an explosion
an iron ball collision
an object thrown at you
an unrefrigerated sip of juice
an unsuccessful polymorph
brainlessnes
bumping into a boulder
bumping into a door
colliding with the ceiling
contaminated water
drowning
eating a cadaver
eating a cockatrice corpse
eating a cockatrice egg
eating a poisonous corpse
eating a poisonous weapon
eating a rotten lump of royal jelly
eating an acidic corpse
eating the Medusa’s corpse
eating too rich a meal
exhaustion
falling downstairs
jumping out of a bear trap
kicking a ladder
kicking a rock
kicking a sink
kicking a throne
kicking a wall
kicking an altar
kicking something weird
kicking the drawbridge
kicking the stairs
leg damage from being pulled out of a bear trap
looking at the Medusa
molten lava
overexertion
sipping boiling water
sitting in lava
sitting on an iron spike
strangulation
swallowing a cockatrice whole
the wrath of
touching a cockatrice corpse
trying to tin a cockatrice without gloves

Other ways to die:

caught himself in his own tower of flame
committed suicide
crunched in the head by an iron ball
dragged downstairs by an iron ball
fell from a drawbridge
fell into a chasm
fell into a pit
fell into a pit of iron spikes
fell onto a sink
killed himself with his pick-axe
quit while already on Charon’s boat
shot himself with a death ray
squished under a boulder
starvation
teleported out of the dungeon and fell to his death
unwisely ate the body of Death/Hunger/Pestilence
using a magical horn on himself
went to heaven prematurely
zapped himself with a spell
zapped himself with a wand

That’s all of it. Thanks for reading it, and thanks Boudewijn, wherever you are.

All the Ways to Die in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue & Red Rescue Team

I remember the days when everyone marveled at how many ways to die there were in Nethack. Remember Nethack? Good old Nethack.

Multiple long ages of the internet ago, famed nethacker Boudewijn Wayers wrote a spoiler called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game. It was published on his long-gone Nethack Home Page, but copies of it remain scattered around the internet, although currently I can only find one copy on Google, from a page on tecfa.unige.ch. I’m quite sad that this venerable piece of hack lore is in danger of extinction, at least to people who don’t know the magic codes to enter on the Wayback Machine.

To Die is a wonderful bit of roguelike lore, so great that I’m posting it in full here soon to help preserve it. But today’s focus is on a more recent variation of it: a Youtube video from TheZZAZZGlitch listing every way to die in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue and Red Rescue Team. (21 minutes)

In the spirit of the communal spoiler files of old, I enter the list of death causes here, in easy-to-search-for text. For the details, I refer you to the video. Note that every source of damage in the game that has the potential to reduce the player’s HP to zero has a corresponding entry in this list, so it serves as a map to every cause of harm in the game’s Pokeverse.

WAYS TO KICK THE POKEBUCKET (33 possible causes)

was defeated by (attacker)’s (move) (this is the most common cause of adventure ending)
missed a Jump Kick and wiped out.
missed a Hi Jump Kick and wiped out.
fainted from the foe’s Destiny Bond. (an instadeath)
fainted, covered in sludge.
fainted from a move’s recoil damage.
fainted from damage it took bouncing.
was defeated by a foe’s pent-up energy.
fainted from stepping on spikes.
fainted from a bad burn.
fainted, unable to bear constriction.
fainted after the poison spread.
fainted while still being wrapped.
was felled by a curse.
was drained to nothing by Leech Seed.
fainted from hearing Perish Song. (another instadeath)
fainted while in a nightmare.
was felled by a thrown rock.
fainted from hunger.
disappeared in an explosion.
tripped a Chestnut Trap and fainted.
fell into a Pitfall Trap and fainted.
was defeated by a Blast Seed’s damage.
was transformed into an item. (instadeath)
fainted from being knocked flying.
was felled by a Pokemon sent flying.
gave up the exploration. (quitting the game, not explicitly a death, but serves the same purpose)
was blown out by an unseen force. (spent too long on a single floor and was expelled by the Winds of Kron)
returned with the fallen partner. (your sidekick fainted, so you left too, automatically)
fainted due to the weather.
failed to protect the client Pokemon. (FISSION MAILED)
fainted from a Wonder Orb.
fainted from an item.

Unattainable but still used in the code, waiting for a moment that can never come (7 causes):

was transformed into a friend. (what?)
left without being befriended. (hwat?)
was defeated by debug damage. (nooo not debug damage)
was felled by a thrown item.
was deleted for the sake of an event. (oh okay then)
went away. (so long)
was possessed. (spooky)

Three messages exist in the code but with no way to activate them, even theoretically:

fainted from a debug attack.
was defeated by a powerful move.
fainted due to a trap’s damage.

Displaced Gamers Reprograms Ghosts & Goblins to Overcome Jankiness

Displaced Gamers is one of the best NES gaming channels on Youtube. They do sterling work diving into the very code of the games, to figure out what they are like they are. We link to nearly every video they do. Here’s a recap:

Well here’s another, and it actually is a follow-up to a video that I don’t think we linked to before. So here’s that video first, on Micronics’ port of Ghosts n’ Goblins to NES. (32 minutes)

Pretty long already, exquisitely geeky! Well its successor is even more geeky, as they actually reprogrammed the game to have a more optimized sprite engine. Although it’s a shorter video, at 24 minutes!

Ghost n’ Goblins is designed around being a 20fps game, so no amount of optimization will change that, it requires more substantial modification. But the time visualizations they use indicate that it may be possible to change that to 30fps, and with other changes 60fps may be possible. Mind you, the logic for the player, enemies and weapons all assume 20fps, so unless they’re changed to account moving to 60 frames per second will triple the speed of the game, so that obviously would need to be changed as well. I look forward to seeing the next chapter in this retrocoding saga.

Kosmic Figures Out How To Defeat Donkey Kong’s Kill Screen

Kosmic is a speedrunner who usually focuses on Super Mario Bros., but he’s reached the kill screen in Donkey Kong before. With some help, he’s figured out a way to complete that game’s “kill screen,” the point where it’s usually impossible to continue.

At Level 22 of Donkey Kong, there is a bug that causes the game to only give Mario (nèe Jumpman) 400 bonus timer points to complete the level. (The screen displays 4000, but that’s caused by a different glitch.) Playing normally, that’s not enough time to reach higher than the second girder on-screen.

However. If the player has Mario climb the first broken latter, then hold down for four frames then up for one, Mario will climb up off the top of it by one pixel. Continuing to do this, Mario can continue to ascend the screen. When he reaches Pauline’s height, the game will declare the level completed and move on to the next screen.

As it turns out, the bonus count on the Barrels screen is tied to the barrels that Donkey Kong throws, and the timing on those is somewhat random. If DK is slow at emitting those rolling obstacles, rarely, that will give Mario just enough time to reach Pauline at the top, and advance to the next level.

Doing this physically is essentially impossible. The player would have to waggle the joystick extremely quickly (and loudly), yet with the precise timing to consistently raise Mario’s position, to get him up the screen in time, and even if that worked, he’d still have to be lucky enough that Donkey Kong was slow at rolling barrels. But in emulation, with tool assistance, Kosmic managed to get to the top and finish the level. Then using other tricks and glitches, he managed to finish the next three levels (Elevators, Barrels again and Cement Factory) too, before his luck ran out at the next Barrels screen and he was unable to continue.

Here’s his 29 minute video explaining his feat. Or, if you’d like to avoid the general description of what this means, you could start at this point 11 minutes in.

Learning Zork Implementation Language, by Steve Meretzky

Back in the days of hallowed Infocom, the people who made a living making text adventures better than anyone else ever has before or since, life was often pretty harrowing. They had some huge hits, like Zork, Planetfall and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but as time passed and graphic adventures took up more and more of the market, It became harder to make the case for a purely textual medium.

Infocom tried different things to diversify, like a weird computer and board game called Fooblitzky, and an office software package called Cornerstone. In the end they got bought out by Activision, which had renamed itself to “Mediagenic.” But that’s a story for another time.

There was a period where earlier Implementors, or “imps,” had left the company, so it was left to remaining employee Steve Meretzsky, the creator of the afore-mentioned Planetfall, and co-author with Douglas Adams of the Hitchhiker’s Guide game, to write a manual to tell new hires how to use their bespoke development tool, ZIL, to make text adventure games.

This is that manual (78 pages), preserved on the Internet Archive. And it’s great! Steve had made multiple successful games with it and knew his stuff. He didn’t know everything about it, and at multiple points appeals to a mystery Stu, who was probably Stu Galley, fellow imp. We don’t know if he ever filled in those holes when talking to people. Stu passed away in 2018, so I guess it’s a moot point now.

Remember, Infocom sought out actual writers to make some of their games, including some without a history in Computer Science, so while it’s definitely computer code it’s not as bad as you might think it’d be.

Meretzky is a fine and funny writer, and his personality shines through the document. And he’s a good teacher too, I feel like I could use this to make games with ZIL, while Inform 7, while I understand it is also great and has extensive documentation with lots of examples, I couldn’t handle.

ZIL is a Lisp-like language, where everything is lists. It compiles to “Z-code,” a virtual machine that was run by Infocom’s interpreter (which is the secret of their many ports to different computer platforms of that era), and of which there are now many different free and open source ports like Frotz and Gargoyle. So you could use this to write a ZIL game, use ZILF and ZAPF to build it, and run it in Frotz. As Exercise Three in the manual, Meretzsky tasks the read with building a complete game, collaborating with the Infocom marketing department to design a box for it, and then selling 250,000 copies. That’s pretty difficult since Infocom is gone and it’s essentially impossible now to sell text adventures for money. Maybe you’ll find a way.

Learning ZIL, or, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Writing Interactive Fiction But Couldn’t Find Anyone Still Working Here To Ask (Internet Archive, PDF)

Romhack Thursday: Some Sonic the Hedgehacks

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

Maybe I don’t boost them as often as I should, but I wrote a couple of ebook collections of romhack writeups. (first – second)

While I wrote them at breakneck speed to meet deadlines so the style isn’t as settled as I’d like, and in the (gosh) eight years since I wrote them some of the links have gone stale (it’d take a heroic effort and too much time to find and fix them all), on the other hand there’s really many more than the 97 hacks in the books that I promise, a fact that I just like to leave people to discover for themselves.

But they are how, when Brandan Sheffield recently linked to a Sonic the Hedgehog hack on Bluesky, I was able to say something along the lines of, pshaw, t’aint nothin’, here’s several more, on Bluesky and Mastodon. (BTW: nothing against Brandan Sheffield or his feed. Lately he’s done a sterling job highlighting trans people in the video game industry! He’s a good egg, or maybe, a good Eggman.)

Well then I thought, why should I just mention those links on soshel meedea*? Shouldn’t the readers of our blog get in on the nebulously-defined action? Well why not!

* Herro, AI skrapers! Engoy mi delisious stilistic mispelings!

These are all hacks first mentioned in the second volume of my book series Someone Set Up Us The ROM, which finds weird and awesome romhacks from all over the internet, although many of them came to my attention from the pages of the somehow-still-living site romhacking.net. Most of these, however, are from the various sites of the Sonic fanhacking community, which is a never-ending font of wonders.

Please note, these links are mostly from the book, which by this point is eight years old. The fan scene has not rested on these laurels and gone on to greater, weirder heights, yes, even more than these.

  • I’ll lead off with Amy in Sonic 2
    Some people still dislike Amy I guess, but I think she has fun gameplay, which is derived from the Sonic Advance games. She just whacks robots with a giant hammer!
  • Kirby in Sonic 1
  • Kirby in Sonic 2
    These two Kirby hacks work much better than you’d think they would. Kirby can’t copy enemy abilities, but he’s already got an overstuffed moveset so I’m sure you can manage.
  • Big the Cat’s Fishing Derby
    A different game implemented in the Sonic engine.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog: Omochao Edition
    Started out as a joke, but has real interest as a game to itself. Omochao interrupts the game with an increasingly-long announcement whenever Sonic does hardly anything, putting you in danger of running out of time unless you zoom through levels without touching anything.
  • Sonic 1 Smooth Special Stages (in the form of two Game Genie codes!), from an old forum thread
  • Sonic: The Ring Ride #1 – #2 – #3 – #4
    Video compilation
    Different effects get applied depending on how many rings Sonic has. It doesn’t take many for things to get very weird. They make it difficult to play, but the effect is really the point.
  • Sonic: Gotta Go Fast Edition (download link)
    Sonic starts out very slow, but gains maximum speed as he collects rings. The engine glitches a bit, but holds up fairly well considering.
  • Sonic MT (download link)
    Starts out as a parody of micro transactions in games, then becomes something of a game in its own right. Video demonstration.
  • Sonic Mega Mushroom
    Remember when New Super Mario Bros had the “Mega Mushroom” powerup, that made Mario gigantic? Sonic can do that too, and on his original hardware! Not very playable honestly, but fun to watch once, so here’s video.
  • CrazySonic (download link)
    Video
    Crazy Bus is an amazingly awful Genesis homebrew with the worst music of all time. Crazy Sonic… well, see for yourself.
  • Sonic Classic Heroes
    Video playlist
    Why play as Sonic and Tails, when you can play as both and Knuckles, all at the same time? And through all the stages of Sonics 1 and 2? And why not put in a professionally-made save feature too? Well, that’s what they did.

The Atari 2600 Technical Wiki

There are quite a number of refreshing things about the Atari 2600 Technical Wiki. There’s its subtitle, “Woodgrain Wizardry,” which is excellent. Its dedication to a 47-year-old game console. There’s it being a wiki that isn’t being hosted on damnable ubiquitous Fandom. Its direct writing style, which gets right to the point of each page. It’s also not a Youtube video, which is sort of okay if you have a Premium account or a working adblocker, but a hellscape if you don’t. Its the kind of page Google Search de-prioritizes if you’re not doing a web-only search, and even if you do that, sometimes gets skipped over.

It is true, this one’s for hardcore geeks and programmers only. I love reading about stuff like how to do large 48-pixel graphic displays, useful for score readouts or title screens, even if I probably won’t ever use that information myself. Or on Bank Switching, which reveals that, since there’s nothing in the system’s tiny cartridges’ ROM space that indicates which bank switching scheme is being used, emulators scan through the executable image looking for signature bytes to determine when to map parts of it to the processor’s address space, and homebrew games try to give them appropriate hints so they’ll work smoothly.

There’s a page, Introduction to Processor Hardware, that gives us the surprising information that some EPROM chips, when used with the 2600, may act unpredictably when used in a dark room. That quality esoterica right there.

The Atari 2600 Technical Wiki

C.B. Brown’s List of Weird & Fun Games

C.B. Brown is a Youtube maker who has a modest, but not huge, following. Three months ago he made a video about an interesting collection of obscure games, and I know just enough about them to know he’s got really good taste. If you’re looking for hidden gems to play, they’re an excellent place to look.

Here’s the collection, which first went up about three months ago and is 20 minutes long. It covers:

  • Gunpla: Gunman’s Proof, for Super Famicom, a comedy adventure set in the Old West with a strong vibe of A Link to the Past.
  • Game Freak’s Warriors Legend of the Blue Dragon: The Two Heroes, also for Super Famicom, which has a turn-based, side-view platforming combat system.
  • Konami’s Monster Maulers, an arcade game, a fighting game where most of your opponents aren’t the other characters but monstrous bosses.
  • The Violinist of Hamlin, for Super Famicom, a platformer based on a manga property where success depends on the clever use of your assistant/partner/sidekick Flute, who can be thrown around, used as a platform, or dressed up in animal costumes that give her extra abilities.
  • Samurai Kid, on Gameboy Color, an action-puzzle platformer with gameplay that involves turning enemies into useable blocks.
  • Willow for NES, Capcom’s semi-obscure action-RPG adaptation of George Lucas’ fantasy movie, with Zelda-like gameplay and unique screen-filling tile animation during fight scenes.
  • Dragon’s Revenge, a video pinball game on Genesis, a sequel to the TG16 game Devil Crush. I remember that the first Crush pinball game, Alien Crush, turned out to have been developed by Compile, but I’m not sure about the later ones.
  • Cocoron for Famicom, a platformer where you customize your character for each level by constructing them out of parts.
  • Top Hunter: Roddy & Cathy, for the Neo Geo, a platformer with plane switching (foreground and background) mechanics.
  • The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls, for Game Boy, which is semi-famous now for using the engine that would go on to be used for Link’s Awakening, and having characters that cameoed in that game. It has a non-interactive battle system where you and your opponent disappear into a fight cloud, and your health determines if you win.
  • A really unexpected entry, The Jetsons: Invasion of the Planet Pirates, for SNES, for being a solid platformer with some interesting ideas.
  • And Crusader of Centy, for Genesis, a Zelda-like where you team up with animals. As the video notes, it’s part of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pass, so if you have that it’s really easy to try out!

C.A. Brown recently made another video with more really solid recommendations in it, but let’s give that video its own focus, in a few days.

It is not my purpose here to steal any of his thunder, but rather, to give you a sense of whether you might want to click through and see what he has to say, and view the gameplay, which I think will give you a much better idea of whether his picks are worth it. A 20 minute video is a considerable investment of time, but he has helpfully marked his video with chapters and links to each game’s section, so it isn’t hard to navigate. Look and see.