it’s mentioned that in one player mode in the original Japanese version dying causes you to reset back to a checkpoint, Gradius-style,
that the game is known to increase the health of boss enemies if you have the blue Laser weapon,
that the game is generally easier if you play in the Player Two position,
that to begin the game with the lowest difficulty rank, it’s best to start the game when attract mode is showing Stage 7 (a space level),
and that the Player One position increases the game rank faster if you have the blue Laser weapon, while the Player Two position increases rank faster if you have the red Vulcan weapon.
A lot of sylvie’s strategy comes from rank management, and manipulating aspects of the game to make it more manageable, which is much more interesting to learn about than to just be told to “git gud.”
Have a look if you like, and if you don’t care about the commentary and just want to watch her deathless Raiden run without any of those pitiful human words, watch this video instead.
Just a quick one today, WumpaGem’s list of decomps that aren’t Clauded or anything, hosted on Backloggd. There’s a lot of them, of varying degrees of completeness: some are done, some are in alpha, some are only planned. Interesting, Twilight Princess and Majora’s Mask are playable, but Ocarina of Time is only planned, probably because Ship of Harkinian stole a lot of its energy but turned out to have been made with AI coding. Particularly, Mario 64 has five different recomps.
I’ve seen some of these weird little messages (34 minutes), edge cases that appear when you talk to someone or witness an event at an unexpected time in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’s three-day cycle, or do it while one of the game’s many masks.
A few of the cases covered:
Tatl the fairy’s information on a couple of the bosses changes as you progress through their fights.
The guards blocking the exits to Clock Town usually use the presence of your sword to determine whether they will let you leave, but if your sword was stolen or is being forged they’ll notice and let you leave anyway. They also give you different hints on which dungeon to do next.
The Astronomer has special dialogue if you speak to him as a Goron or a Zora.
The residents of Clock Town each have their own little story of how they’re handling their impending destruction. The Swordsman especially has interesting reactions that change as the clock ticks down.
The Swordsman also, like the Happy Mask Salesman, has a reaction to every mask you can wear to his shop. The lady in the Treasure Chest game and the both the proprietor of the Trading Post and his employee have unique reactions to some of the masks.
If Deku Link can shoot bubbles they can play the archery game, not even needing a bow!
What’s great about all of these cases is none of them are necessary to win the game! It’s there for the players who try to experience Majora’s Mask’s story from every angle. Disable used a text dump to chart out all of the game’s dialogue on a web page here.
DidYouKnowGaming posted a video in 2021 with the provocative title “The Japan Only Metroid Game That Changed The Series,” (8½ minutes) and as is usually the case with clickbait titles like that, it’s leaving out important information: the game in question is a gamebook, not a video game at all.
I don’t often like rewarding clickbait, although doing it to some extent is largely unavoidable now. Here is the video embedded, if you want to see it for yourself.
The gamebook is called Metroid: Zebes Invasion Order, an example of gaming ephemera of the same stature as the Worlds of Power series of books. The video enthuses about how it foreshadowed elements that would appear in later games, although both the games and the book would have been inspired by the same pop cultural elements, the Alien movies, so it makes sense they would vibrate with a similar frequency.
Illustration of our hero, Samus Aran, from Twinetroid, ultimately from the gamebook
You can watch the video if you want to know more about it. Here are some salient facts.
The gamebook is roughly of a type with the Fighting Fantasy books from the UK, giving you various situations to overcome and a basic battle system for fighting enemies.
Also like Fighting Fantasy, it’s pretty difficult.
The battle system uses dice, and asks that you record your exploration with a hand-drawn map, and record your inventory on a sheet of paper.
Secret rooms were handled in a novel way. As a gamebook in the same ballpark as Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure, you would sometimes be given a choice and a page number to turn to. Secret rooms would tell you only part of the page number, leaving you to search through the book for the right page. Important items were hidden this way.
The book has ballooned in price, with copies selling, in 2021 when the video was made, for around $2,000.
Yet scans of the book can be found online, and Devin Monnens used them to assemble, using Twine, a kind of play-like of the book, called Twinetroid and hosted at Metroid Database. It changes a few things for the format, automating combat and changing the mechanics of the secret room search. The instruction page mentions hidden hyperlinks, which is an interesting solution.
Combat example from Twinetroid
One interesting aspect of the game is that it largely recreates the play structure of the original game: the game world is divided into three major sections, you find items that increase you exploration ability, and you backtrack into earlier rooms to use those items to access new paths. There is an automap, but it doesn’t record anything about what’s in each room. You’ll probably need to take notes.
If Samus “dies,” you can still restart from a checkpoint with all the items you’ve found. Once you defeat the Mother Brain the game isn’t over yet though, becoming more of a traditional text adventure from that point, with a variety of endings. Give it a try, and experience an obscure piece of Metroid history.
Twinetroid (Twine-based text adventure, from Metroid Database)
You wanna know something? I think everyone should learn to program. I don’t mean using some, the word I usually use is cockamamie, “AI,” that will produce brittle, inefficient, unmaintainable code if it doesn’t mess it up, but actually code. I think most of the difficulty with coding is actually in the languages. Woe betide the person trying to learn to program in C++ from scratch these days. C is much better, but still obtuse. Python is better, but also not great for systems or performance work.
The solution? Why, learn to code in assembly of course!
Aaaaand 90% of readers just clicked away. Hah.
But the funny thing is, for many languages, assembly is actually a little easier than them I’d say. When you’re working directly with the hardware, all the weird abstractions you have to learn fall away. It does mean you have to do everything, and I mean everything, yourself. But on the other hand, programming is largely the process of connecting building blocks together, tiny routines comprising larger ones. It takes longer to do it in assembly, and working with a lot of current-day hardware is trickier because you have to jump through more hoops to use it. But its difficulty, I think anyway, is a little overblown.
There’s a wealth of material to peruse, including videos walking you through coding a bunch of different architectures, including 6502, 8086, Z80, 6809, 68000, and even ARM, among others. Even if you have no interest in actually coding for these multifarious* chips, just knowing out they work may be very interesting to you, if not be actually useful someday.
Here, to get some idea of how understandable this will be to you, take a look at his series on assembly coding for the C64 (Youtube playlist, 13 videos, about 170 minutes in all), beginning here:
* That’s 17 points with no bonuses, but 67 if a bingo
It was brought to my attention by <b>scruss</b> over on Metafilter (Mastodon) that Peter Jennings, not the newscaster but an oldschool hardwre guy, has a long and great page on the creation of a standalone chess-playing computer for Commodore in its early days, we’re talking between the creation of the KIM-1 and the VIC-20.
It’s a terrific article that covers far more than just Jennings’ experience making the device, covering among other things a pitch to Mattel, meeting with 6502 designer Chuck Peddle, a story of Bobby Fisher, and the unfortunate news that Jack Tramiel, then the boss of Commodore, rarely paid vendors what they were due. Seems about normal for the man.
There’s even a long list of interesting links about the Chessmate at the end. I can’t recommend it enough!
Starflight is an amazing game. First for the PC, but then with ports for the C64 and, of all things, the Genesis/Mega Drive. It was the first game to really nail the sense of being a kind of Star Trek simulator, with its combination of open-ended exploration and alien interaction.
PC Starflight (image from the article)
It’s possible to think of Starflight as being a trilogy, with itself, its sequel, and the quite similar Star Control II. Greg Johnson, one of my favorite people working in games, was a major mover on all three. Johnson went on to be one of the people behind ToeJam & Earl and a number of other projects, including some terrific music, and is currently working on the eagerly-awaited Dancing With Ghosts.
Time Extension translated an interview with four of the people who made the original Starflight, including Greg Johnson, from a German podcast. The story of the game’s creation is a bit rocky, with some of the principals having to put in their own money or take out loans to live on during its creation. It’s also a tale of the final moments of the good days of Electronic Arts, right before they discovered there was a lot more money running series into the ground and tying up the rights to multiple big-league sports than their original mandate of nurturing independent creators and making possible unique software visions.
But don’t weep for what could have been; instead, rejoice that it happened at all. Remember that Tarn Adams, half of the duo who make the literally incredible Dwarf Fortress, credits Starflight as a major inspiration. The path to the future, and the long-delayed realization of video games as a transcendent art form, runs through many different people, but the thread holds firm. The coming decades will see great things, and Starflight is but one brick in their foundation.
There is a universe of Japanese home computer games that are largely unknown in Western territories, especially the US which never got a local MSX machine. Some of these games can be played officially with emulation via Project EGG, and some of those are even available on Switch as part of EGGCONSOLE.
But the problem remains, most of them are in Japanese, a difficult language to pick up if you didn’t grow up with it. Well the Youtube channel Beyond the Scanlines has selected a few of them that are playable without any Japanese language knowledge (14 minutes).
Guardic is a strategic exploratory shooter from Compile that’s both an interesting game in its own right and the predecessor of the NES classic The Guardian Legend (Guardic Gaiden on Famicom).
Hydlide is a game that’s available on NES and is pretty infamous there, but it does play a bit better in its original version.
Slipheed is a classic shooter with 3D graphics that still hold up pretty well today.
The Scheme is a platform that I honestly don’t know much about, except from this video!
And of course Zanac is another classic Compile shooter. I think the Famicom/NES version is mostly better, but don’t sell this version short.
Please consider enjoying, if that is something you are able to enjoy. That is to say, to you, it’s enjoyable. If it isn’t, if it’s enjoy-not-able, maybe tomorrow’s post will meet your inscrutable fancy. (That is to day, sour fancy is able to be inscruted.)
The World Wide Web is now over thirty years old. In that time, more content has vanished from it than remains now, but some of it can still be dredged up from the shadowy archives of the Wayback Machine. This is the latest chapter in our never-ending search to find the cool gaming stuff that time forgot….
Microsoft pioneered a form of hypertext that came onto the scene around the same time that HTML, the format that web browsers read and display, did. As sometimes happens with Microsoft, they didn’t really understand what they had there, and relegated it to a format for help files, called WinHelp, which debuted on Windows 3.0.
HTML unquestionably won out over it, but the WinHelp format, extension .htp, and its successor Compiled HTML Help or CHM, has some advantages. Both are self-contained, bundling all of the individual pages of the help system into a single file, and didn’t need network access to read them. That ease of transport meant in the early days of the World Wide Web you could sometimes find downloadable Windows Help files, and that’s the format that the “Roadmap to the Information Superhighway” was released in.
The Roadmap, from Spring 1995. Just take a moment to bask in that green-on-bright-cyan text.
In the early years of the Web it quickly became obvious that there was a great need to enhance findability, that the greatest website in the world was useless if no one knows it exists. The Roadmap, and the previous year’s upstart Yahoo (later called Yahoo Directory) were two attempts to combat the obscurity problem. I insist that this problem has always been with us, that the creation and rapid adoption of Google just made it less obvious for a while, and now that the Goog’s enshittified its bed, entering its dotage and embracing “AI,” it’s become more visible how difficult it is to find interesting things online. (It’s why I’m still a devoted Metafilter member and poster even now, 27 years after its creation.)
The Roadmap to the Information Superhighway (it calls itself the Official Roadmap) is mostly a list of tutorials and links. It is so old that it refers to “the Mosaic,” Mosaic being the first popular web browser. Yet even back then enshittification was still present in online spaces, and this edition of the Roadmap was deep into it, so some of the links you click on will open up, in its own window, an ad for its “Internet Yellow Pages.” They were double-dipping: the Roadmap itself cost money, $39 for a subscription, which is probably why it was supplanted by Yahoo, and even print listings of websites.
A portion of the Roadmap’s section on Gopher
In 1995 the Web had only been around for five years or so, and substantial portions of it were still accessible only through protocols like News, Gopher, Telnet and even web BBSes, so a portion of its text went to explaining how to use these services. There’s even a page on how to use Finger, which being a very Unixy thing, was something a lot of people just didn’t use even then.
I’d like to someday go through all its links and find out what percentage of them, but even then there were a lot of websites, and yet I fear the proportion of them that are still active is depressingly low. I’ve complained here before how some people still seem to think the internet is forever, when it is really really not, we’ve lost countless pages and sites, and the Internet Archive’s collection of them is spotty. It’s a miracle that it exists at all, and they are well-deserving of your donation dollars, if you can spare a few. It’s a miracle that they host the copy of the Roadmap that I link above.
A hint to browsing the roadmap from WINE, at least one of its links, the one reading What Is the Internet Superhighway?, crashes its Help reader when I open it.
To return to the phenomenon of WinHelp, the original Windows Help stopped being bundled with Windows Vista, and Windows 10 completely dropped support for it. You can still load Help files, like the Roadmap, on Linux systems using WINE, and that’s where my screenshots come from. Isn’t it just like Microsoft to invent a technology that other people now support far better than they do?
Metroid’s famous JUSTIN BAILEY password was not a secret hardcoded password included by the developers, the fact that it worked was completely accidental.
Secret of Evermore didn’t use Secret of Mana’s engine (despite apparent simularities), and was never intended to be a sequel to Secret of Mana, nor did it replace Seiken Densetsu III in Square’s US release schedule.
The Mega Drive II (released in the US as the Genesis, as opposed to the Sega Genesis) did not remove the original’s Z80 co-processor, it just used a smaller version of it in a different package.
The Atari Jaguar didn’t claim its system was “64-bit” by adding up the bits of two 32-bit processors, it was a lot more complicated than that and the system contained 16, 32 and 64-bit components. (Measuring by bitness is often misleading anyway.)
There was a claim that Satoru Iwata himself implemented compression in Pokemon Gen 2 (Gold/Silver/Crystal) that allowed the Kanto region from Gen 1 to be included as well. Iwata did implement compression for Gen 2, but it was to increase decompression speed, not to save more space.
Eternal Darkness: Challenge From the Dark Side on Sega CD didn’t use an Amiga-like Hold-And-Modify mode to display 256 colors at once. This game doesn’t display that many colors anyway, it uses dithering to increase the apparent number of colors onscreen.
And finally, a pretty well-known fact now: the mirror room in Super Mario 64 doesn’t reflect the room that Mario is in, but just renders another copy of Mario that echoes his movements, reversed.
EDIT: I got the time wrong for Eastern Daylight! It’s 5-7 PM (today, Sunday), not 4-6. Oops!
It’s yet another of those times of year again! The specific moment to look forward to? It’s the preview event for Roguelike Celebration 2026, taking place online tomorrow (Sunday)! You can get a free ticket for it here. Although tickets are free, you will still need to get one to attend.
The preview event this year happens on September 13th from 2 to 4 PM Pacific Daylight Time, meaning 5 to 7 PM on the US East Coast. The talks this year are:
Ancient Roguelikes: The Pre-History of Roguelike Games by Martin Pichlmair
Bitwise Black Magic: How to Computer, Better Faster Stronger by Greg L
Don’t Save The @: What Roguelikes Teach Us About Story Structure by Jamie Brittain
The full conference is happening online from October 17-18. You’ll need to get a ticket for it too; they nominally aren’t free, but you can usually receive one gratis if you can’t afford it and ask nicely. For more information please check out the homepage for Roguelike Celebration here.
