Set Side B

Time Extension: Why Do So Many Japanese RPGs Use European-Style Fantasy Worlds?

Time Extension has come up here a lot lately, hasn’t it? It’s because they so often do interesting articles! This one’s about the propensity of Japanese games to use medieval European game worlds, the kinds with a generally agrarian society, royalty, knights, and their folklore counterparts elves, dwarves, fairies, gnomes and associated concepts.

They often fudge the exact age they’re trying to depict, with genuine medieval institutions sitting beside Renaissance improvements like taverns and shops. Nearly of them also put in magic in a general D&D kind of way, sometimes institutionalizing it into a Harry Potter-style educational system.

Notably, they usually choose the positive aspects of that setting. The king is usually a benevolent ruler. It’s rare that serfdom and plagues come up. The general populace is usually okay with being bound to the land. The Church, when it exists, is sometimes allowed to be evil, in order to give the player a plot road to fighting God at the end.

Hyrule of the Zelda games is likely the most universally-known of these realms, which I once called Generic Fantasylands. The various kingdoms of the Dragon Quest games also nicely fit the bill. Final Fantasy games were among the first to question those tropes, presenting evil empire kingdoms as early at the second game.

Dragon Quest
(All images here from Mobygames)

John Szczepaniak’s article at Time Extension dives into the question by interviewing a number of relevant Japanese and US figures and developers, including former Squaresoft translator Ted Woolsey. I think the most insightful comments are from Hiromasa Iwasaki, programmer of Ys I and II, who notes that this Japanese conception of a fantasy world mostly comes from movies and the early computer RPGs Wizardry and Ultima, that the literature that inspired Gary Gygax to create Dungeons & Dragons (which in turned inspired Wizardry and Ultima), especially Lord of the Rings and Weird Tales, were generally unknown to Japanese popular culture. Developer Rica Matsumura notices, also, that there is a cool factor in Japan to European folklore that doesn’t apply, over there, to Japanese folklore.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

It’s a great read, that says a number of things well that have been bubbling up in the back of my head for a long time, especially that JRPGs recreated both RPG mechanics and fantasy tropes at a remove, that they got their ideas second hand and, in a way similar to how a bunch of gaming tables recreated Dungeons & Dragons in their own image to fill in gaps left in Gary Gygax’s early rulebooks, so too did they make their versions of RPGs to elaborate upon the ideas of Wizardry and Ultima without having seen their bases.

Why Do So Many Japanese RPGs Take Place In European Fantasy Settings? (timeextension.com)

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Fediverse Find: Lemmy Post on Great Obscure Games

Reddit has been severely wounded. I’m sure it’ll keep going for a while, there’s still a lot of people who use it, but it no longer feels like an unalloyed good, it’s obvious that its owners care more about profits than their unpaid mod staff, and a lot of the best users, the ones who produce the really interesting posts and comments, are leaving for other climes.

And… I’m glad. Even though I used Reddit, and Twitter too, I felt bad for doing so. Single websites should not be such a large part of the internet. These are ultimately reimplementations of older ideas of course, community discussion sites go all the way back to Usenet, which predates the World Wide Web by nearly a decade. The main reason anyone cares about them is that there’s already lots of people there, and their value grows as more people are involved with them.

Anything that breaks the hold of bigcorps over substantial pieces of the internet is a positive thing, IMO. All those people who are leaving Twitter for Bluesky or Threads, I feel like I need to warn them, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be put back into this situation again, no internet site of service run by venture capital, or put under the gun by shareholders and “fiduciary duty,” can escape being ruined. It is an impossibility, the drive for ever-greater profits will inevitably ruin them. This ends the editorial portion of this post.

The most promising alternative to corporate ownership and control at the moment is the “Fediverse,” a collection of sites that all talk to each other and interoperate. Whether it’ll be the solution to the capitalist internet remains to be seen, there’s lots of challenges ahead for them, but one small current win is a post on lemmy.world’s Games board, asking users for their favorite obscure games. It’s got rather a lot of comments of people, all reminiscing about their favorites. It’s worth a good look, for you’re both certain to find people who love the same neglected titles that you do, and a whole bunch of games to investigate that you’ve never heard of before. It’s a marvel.

lemmy.world Games: What’s your favorite game you never hear anybody talk about?

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From WIRED: Space Invaders’ Creator 45 Years Later

Back on April 12th, WIRED Magazine published an article about Space Invaders 45 years after its original production. In it they spoke with the creator of iconic arcade game, Tomohiro Nishikado, who now considers it the best game he ever made.

A screenshot of *actual* arcade Space Invaders, although admittedly without its color overlay.

Despite them including the Atari 2600 version as if it were the original (the two games are similar but ultimately rather different), it’s a nice look back.

The arcade industry existed for six years before Space Invaders, a period that is often forgotten. Two games in particular I think kicked off the meteoric, and short-lived, rise of arcade gaming as a cultural force: Atari’s Asteroids, and Taito’s Space Invaders. Asteroids was actually more popular in the U.S., but Space Invaders was still one of the most successful arcade games ever sold in the States. In Japan, its success was, and I believe still is, unequaled.

Video games at that time were tied to their hardware in a way they almost never are now. Gaming is now mostly done with graphics hardware that is mostly replaceable. Back then, arcade hardware was usually purpose-built, with the capabilities the design required. Space Invaders is an example where the hardware constraints really made the game. It was one of the few games at the time to use framebuffer hardware: a bank of memory that corresponded directly to the display, in Space Invaders’ case, every pixel on screen echoing the state of a dot in memory.

There were a number of reasons that this wasn’t used by most games. Memory was expensive, and a screen-sized bitmapped display needed a lot of it. More colors requires even more memory to be able to depict all the possible states, so Space Invaders’ screen was monochrome with a color overlay.

Possibly the biggest reason of all: it takes a CPU a lot of time to shuffle around all those bits. Computers are fast, but they still have their limits. Space Invaders uses an Intel 8080, the chip they made before the 8086 which was the foundation for the x86 line, but still only an 8-bit processor.

Space Invaders, ingeniously, uses the 8080’s slowness at updating the framebuffer as a strength. As the armada of aliens moves across the screen, the processor is updating them as rapidly as it is able, erasing and drawing each into its new position one at a time. As the player shoots them, there are fewer ships to draw, and so it can get its updating done faster. This naturally causes the fleet to progress across the screen faster and faster as they’re wiped out, with the last alien rushing across with all that CPU power freed up by the destruction of its comrades.

Space Invaders had even more clever ideas in its design than that. It was an early example of a game using a life system, borrowed from the limited balls players were allowed in pinball games. But also, the game had a sudden loss condition: if any alien managed to make it all the way down the screen to the ground, the game instantly ended.

There was considerable strategy in deciding which aliens to shoot first. Wiping out rows from the bottom of the formation delayed the whole armada from reaching the bottom by one pass across the screen, but if the player destroyed a column off one of the sides, all of those aliens would have to travel further before they could descend a level. Or, if the player was prepared to take a bit more of a risk, they could wipe out columns in the middle of the formation, which means the aliens would descend more rapidly, but leaving a hole in the ranks through which to shoot the Mystery Ship that passed by at the top of the screen.

The “trail” bug in action.
(image from Digital Press)

The game even has a couple of secret features, which is pretty interesting considering the game was released in 1978. The points awarded by the Mystery Ship appeared random at first, but was in fact went through a cycle that advanced every time the player fired a shot. And, as documented in Craig Kubey’s The Winner’s Book of Video Games, if a skilled player could annihilate a whole rack of aliens while leaving one of them from the two lowest rows of the board, it would leave a trail behind it. digipress.com reveals that this was caused by a bug in the code, but later versions of Space Invaders promoted this trick to a legitimate secret.

Space Invaders has inspired many remakes and revivals through the years, the first, Space Invaders Part II, also known as Space Invaders Deluxe, introduced new kinds of aliens that split in two when shot. That’s not to be confused with the later Space Invaders DX, released in 1993. Before that came Return of the Invaders in 1985, and Space Invaders Part IV: The Majestic 12 in 1991. A while after there were Space Invaders Extreme, which got its own sequel, and other games I can’t be bothered to look up right now. Recently, in 2016, arcades have even seen a fairly interesting Space Invaders lightgun game from Raw Thrills, called Space Invaders Frenzy. (I tend to be harsh on Raw Thrills here, but it’s actually pretty interesting!)

45 years. Not bad for an ancient 8-bit arcade game that struggled to shift black-and-white pixels around.

The ‘Space Invaders’ Creator Reveals The Game’s Origin Story (WIRED)

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Pikmin 2 Treasure Changes For Switch

Remember when Pikmin 2 came out on Gamecube? It marked a considerable departure from the first game’s structure. Pikmin had a hard time limit, and it was rather a rush to complete the game within its 30 days on your first try. Pikmin 2 dispensed with that, giving players as many days as they wanted. It also had “dungeon” areas, semi-random underground mazes where even the day timer was paused. A considerable portion of the game was in those underground areas.

One of the less-remembered things about Pikmin 2 was that it had actual product placement in it. Many of the treasures you found were outright commercial objects, modeled and textured in the game, some with vaguely promotional names, like “Courage Reactor” for Duracell Battery, or “Quenching Emblem” for a 7-Up bottle cap. Even the European and Japanese versions had these, although they reflected products from their territories instead.

Presumably because the licensing deals for these objects have expired, the Switch 2 version of Pikmin 2 uses different, more generic items in place of the trademarked originals. The replacements are an interesting lot. Where they could have just removed the old textures and replaced them with solid colors, they put in fake ingredients lists (too small to read), “Established 1920” notices, fake slogans and logos, notices of product quantity in Imperial units with metric equivalent, and more. You’d almost believe Olimar was finding real goods from Earth, ones that you just haven’t heard of. The tip-off is, the names of the replacement products are just slightly too generic. “Coconut Water” and “Night Lip Balm” are descriptive but generic, and so but really able to be trademarked. They’re a nice batch of fake brands though. For “Pineapple Fresh Slices,” they even made up a realistic-looking US-style Nutrition Facts label!

The differences have been recorded in a video by ModenXP on Youtube, embedded below:

And now, as an exercise in overkill, here’s a list of all the old and new versions, and interesting things about the replacements:

Courage Reactor (280 poko)	Duracell D-Cell battery	“Electric Power Super Battery,” a fake brand that replaces the multiple Duracell items among the treasures. It’s also a D cell. There’s a warning box that’s too small for me to read.
Quenching Emblem (100 poko)	7-Up bottle cap	Bottle cap for “Spicy Ginger Ale, Premium Quality.” There’s some other text along the outer edge that’s just on the other side of the readability afforded by the texture compression.
Alien Billboard (80 poko)	Kiwi Shoe Polish, 1 1/8 ounce (31 gram) size	“Shoe Polish, highquality shoe care.” “Established 1920.” The size is 32 grams, “1,128 OZ” in the British style, using a comma as the decimal separator instead of a period. The slogan “Shine & Protect” runs along the outer edge of the lid.
Drought Ender (100 poko)	Old-style Dr. Pepper bottle cap	A bottle cap for “Coconut Water,” evidently a product someone would want to buy. The rim assures us, twice, that it is in fact “100% Pure Coconut Water.” Promise or threat, you decide.
Survival Ointment (90 poko)	A tube of ChapStick lip balm	“Night Lip Balm,” with “Extra Moisture.” Lots of tiny unreadable text on this one.
Gerkin Gate/Flavor Gate (100 poko)	A lid to a jar of Vlasic pickles	The only item with a different title. This is “Orange Jam,” “Made With Real Fruit,” “Organic Homemade Product.” 13.4 oz (380 grams). Shouldn’t they have just called it marmalade?
Creative Inspiration (100 poko)	Old-style bottle cap for RC Cola, eternal third-place in the cola wars	“Delicious! Black Berry Soda.” One of the more generic logos.
Patience Tester (130 poko)	A can of Sun Luck water chestnuts. How many company ad departments would let a licensor get away with implying their product tests one’s patience?	“Pineapple, Fresh Slices.” “In heavy syrup.” Oh, joy. (I don’t like pineapple, and pineapple syrup is not something I would ever care to try.) It’s interesting that they changed even the type of product here, although it’s the same sized can.
Healing Cask (60 poko)	A jar of Carmex salve, “FOR-COLD-SORES.” Even though the lid looks like it’s from the 50s, I think this is how the product looks even today.	“Organic” Aloe Vera Cream. Nice stylized rendering of a plant on the cover, but otherwise pretty ordinary.
Salivatrix (30 poko)	A lid for Dannon “Fruit on the Bottom.” Fruit on the bottom of what? It doesn’t say! It does tell us it has “Same Great Taste!”, but again, the same great taste of what? The mysteries belie this treasure’s paltry value. Bee the why, “Salivatrix” sounds like an enabler of a particularly niche kink.	“Morning Fruit Yogurt.” Aaah that’s right, Dannon makes yogurt! Did they remake Pikmin 2 just so they could fix their omission? Blueberry, and Low Fat, Net Wt. 15 oz (425.25g). Thanks for the two decimal places of metric accuracy, fake yogurt lid.
Thirst Activator (300 poko)	Cap to a bottle of Tree Top juice. What variety is left unspecified. One of the little jokes of the game is how far off the retail value the Salvage Pod’s valuation of your treasures is. 300 poko is pretty valuable!	“FRESH Organic Fruit Sauce.” The name is still Thirst Activator though. Brings to mind gulping down a nice hearty jar of Ragu’s finest, mm-mmm. Both versions of the treasure have arrows telling a consumer which way to open the jar.
Massive Lid (100 poko)	Old-style cap to a bottle of Yoo-Hoo Cola. Cola? The internet is mum as to the history of this mysterious product. I don’t want to imagine what it was like.	The cap now reads “Mountain Water.” It’s a metal bottlecap, as if to a glass bottle. At least it’s recyclable. The title is odd; it’s a small cap, there’s plenty of bigger lids in the treasure hoard.
Happiness Emblem (100 poko)	Another old-style bottlecap, this to a can of Squirt grapefruit soda. Squirt, a Dr. Pepper brand, is still made and sold even today.	Ginger Ale LIGHT. Has an ingredients list right on the cap, just like the Squirt cap had. The ingredients are even readable: carbonated Water, high-fructose corn syrup, ginger extract. Hey, I’d drink it. Nintendo’s localizers know their territory.
Durable Energy Cell (160 poko)	Duracell C-Cell battery.	Electric Power Super Battery, again, Duracell’s counterpart in the Pikmin ludomatic universe.
Endless Repository (130 poko)	A can of Beach Cliff Sardines, “Proudly made in the USA” and “in soybean oil.”	“Sardines, Skinless & Boneless.” “In olive oil & lemon.” The “pull ring easy-open” and fake UPC code are nice touches. This is one of my favorite fake products, even though I’ve never eaten a canned fish in anger.
Pondering Emblem (100 poko)	Cap to a bottle of Yoo-Hoo Chocolate Flavored Beverage. The pondering part of it is wondering what the hell Yoo-Hoo is made of.	“Milk Crown” Cream Soda. Nice stylized representation of a splash of milk. The cap tells us “artificial flavor & color.” Remember to demand natural flavoring and coloring from your fictional video-game beverages!
Abstract Masterpiece (30 poko)	A Snapple Cap. You can’t flip it over to see if there’s a Snapple Fact on the bottom.	Sunny Tropical Juice. “What kind of juice?” “Tropical.” At least the label tells us it’s made from the best natural fruit. No synthetic fruit here, oh no no.
Optical Illustration (140 poko)	Lid to a jar of Ragu tomato-based sauce. I joked about it, and lo, it has come into being. There is very little optical here, and it hardly qualifies as an illustration	“Tomato Basil” homemade pasta sauce. One of the faker-looking treasures.
Activity Arouser (100 poko)	The “W”-logo from the lid of a can of Wilson tennis balls.	One of the few overtly fake brands, with a logo of a flaming tennis ball and the cryptic word “TARAI” in a sci-fi font. No other information is supplied. This mystery is going to haunt me.
Proton AA (90 poko)	Duracell AA-Cell battery.	The third of the Electric Power Super Battery collection. It looks a whole lot like one of those battery brands you can find at a dollar store, that last roughly 23 seconds when put to use.
Drone Supplies (130 poko)	Underwood Deviled Ham Spread. A really distinctive package, round but wrapped in paper with a unique fold at the top.	Tuna Salad Spread. The kept the paper wrapping. This is the one with the realistic Nutrition Facts label on the back.
Fuel Reservoir (120 poko)	Duracell 9-Volt battery.	Last of the Electric Power Super Battery set.
Fruit Guard (130 poko)	A can (not just the lid!) of Tree Top apple juice. The words “Apple Juice” are not written in Comic-Sans, but it does look a lot like they are.	FRESH Organic 100% apple juice. FRESH seems to be the replacement brand for Tree Top. At least it’s not drinkable fruit sauce this time. Also has a Nutritional Facts label on the back (as does the original).
Nutrient Silo (130 poko)	Skippy creamy peanut butter.	Ribbon’s peanut butter. They made a cute little logo involving a pair of cartoon peanuts for it! I demand fan art of them immediately, get to work! Also has a Nutrition Facts box and fake barcode.
Yellow Taste Tyrant (100 poko)	The yellow, unpainted plastic lid of a wide-mouthed container of French’s mustard. The French’s logo is molded into the surface, and seems to react to light, which is interesting.	A green painted illustration of a hot dog with the words “Hot Mustard” twice. The modeled French’s logo is gone.
Stringent Container (130 poko)	A canister of Clabber Girl baking powder.	The canister is of “Baking Powder,” “Queen’s Quality,” “Double Acting” and “Gluten Free.” Established 1932! Like the original, has both nutrition facts and a recipe, here for a chocolate muffin. You can just make out that a “serving” of this can of baking powder has 55 calories. At the bottom of the nutrition facts it says “European Leading Brand.”
Hypnotic Platter (100 poko)	Bottle cap for A&W (presumably) Root Beer. Caffeine free.	“19TH Anniversary” premium orange juice. Apparently sold in soda-style glass bottles?

There are also probably changed descriptions in the Piklopedia for these items, but I have yet to get the game myself so I can’t report on those.

27 Treausres that Changed in Pikmin 2 on Switch (Youtube, 14 minutes)

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alienmelon on Virtual Pets and Desktop Toys

alienmelon is Nathalie Lawhead, a desktop toy creator who’s made a lot of cool things, like the Electric Zine Maker and Cyberpet Graveyard. Back in 2021 she made this great roundup of her own desktop toy work, as well as that of others. It was a whole field of computer software, not really games, that faded into obscurity right around the time that social media, that bane of all good internet things, started becoming big. Desktop toys were often distributed on personal websites, and Facebook and Twitter tend to muscle out those kinds of places.

Some of the toys she’s made are the Electric Love Potatoes, virtual stray cats, fake virus checkers, love stories between the files on your computer, and RUNONCE, a virtual pet you can only play with a single time, after which it’s dead and gone, refusing to run again.

The article lists all of these, but with that it’s just getting started, linking to a plethora of old toys. One that comes to mind personally is the classic Neko desktop pet, a pixel-art kitty cat that would chase your cursor then fall asleep.

It’s a great introduction to/recollection of an old and vanished age of software. And it also contains the phrase, “In retrospect I don’t think it was cool of me to scare my mom with a potato.”

Make Tiny Weird Software, Please! (all about desktop pets, old computer eras, and virtual toys)

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The Guardian Legend Shrine

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….

Part of the network of the similarly venerable shmups.com, The Guardian Legend Shrine is nearly the ideal game shrine, a static site crammed full of screenshots, strategy tips, fan art and fiction, and generally just everything of interest to a fan of the NES game.

“BOO!” Who is this supposed to be though? A villain? There’s no one looking anything like this in the game.

The Guardian Legend, recently covered by Jeremy Parish within Metroidvania Works as part of his penance for coining the term in the Before Times, is a cult classic in the genre. Design by “Moo” Niitani at Compile, it combines their deadly-sharp shooters with the exploratory gameplay of The Legend of Zelda. It even has its own form of the confusion as to who the main character is supposed to be. In this case, it’s pretty obvious in play that she’s a cyborg bikini girl out to blast aliens, but you wouldn’t know it at all from the manual or US box art. She’s just “The Guardian,” because otherwise it’d be more evident that you play as a girl.

Naria’s fanart. I like this one, it’s fairly tasteful.

Last updated in 2002, the heyday of the age of the internet fan shrine, its art section is full of crudely-drawn sent-in art of its main character Miya, or Alyssa, or whatever she’s called. Most of it is chaste, thankfully-this isn’t DeviantArt we’re talking sbout here. I wonder about the people who sent those drawings now, and how they feel about work they made probably as a kid still floating around the internet. The game was already nine years old at that time, so they really couldn’t have been that young?

Okay. We’ve found the perfect fan art. The rest of you can wrap it up, you can’t defeat this.

It seems likely that no one’s worked on the site for a long long while. The hit counter and guestbook don’t work, and the link to an archive of NES manuals is broken. The newest entry on the News page says they had lost their FTP password, but then found it again, and a new update should be coming soon. That was in 2002, so you know, any day now.

That Blue Randar is, as they say, *totes adorbs*.

The Downloads page has links to the game’s roms, shamelessly promulgated to all passers-by, as well as a lot of other media taken-from and inspired-by the game. As just one more example of just how old this is, the suggested emulator for playing the roms is Nesticle.

The original game is 34 years old now, and not getting younger. The age of the web fan shrine is long past, and its parent site Shmups hasn’t itself been updated since 2010. Who knows how much longer it’ll be with it. SO please, take a few moments to explore this relic of a past age. Do it for me. Do it for “Moo” Niitani. Do it for Miya/Alyssa/The Guardian/whatever. And especially, do it for Blue Rendar. Look into those googly eyes, how could you say no to them?

Christopher Emirzian’s Guardian Legend Shrine

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Bad Game Hall of Game: Sword of Sodan

Bad Game Hall of Game is an interesting blog that talks about failed titles without the snark with which they were usually treated in the early days of the Web, or the rancor of The Angry Video Game Nerd. Snark and furor drive hits, of course, so I can respect the desire to give games many regard as kusoge their due, whatever that may be.

When you know it? It’s simple.
When you don’t? It’s unfair.

Truthfully, there are lots of games that are perceived as bad that aren’t really so terrible, often due to the audience-chasing bile emitted by folk like Seanbaby and Something Awful. Games intended to be played for challenge, especially those from arcades and the earlier years of consoles, are kind of a pastime for masochists. When you lose, it often feels like it’s not your fault, but was it really? Was that hit telegraphed and avoidable? Was there some clever technique to be discovered, like jumping and slicing through an Ironknuckle’s helmet in Zelda II, that makes seemingly impossible enemies a simple matter to defeat? And when a game is intended to be played many times, not shattered in a single session but returned to many times, getting a bit further each time, isn’t it supposed to be a good thing that you may lose your first time out?

I took these screenshots myself for this post. See what I do for you.

There are lots of armchair game designers, maybe even more than armchair movie directors, since players spend more time with games generally before they put them down, and it’s easier, theoretically at least, to make games yourself without the capital expenditure and outside labor that movies require. (I can tell you though, it’s still plenty hard.) And yet, they are the players, and if they’re not having fun, then the game is doing it wrong. Even if it’s because of some information or training the player hasn’t, in their life, gained, you can’t blame them. Maturity can help a player enjoy games they wouldn’t otherwise. But this is also true of any art form, and the opposite could also be said to be true, there are games where, I’d say, maturity is an outright barrier to enjoyment. It’s complicated. Maybe I’ll talk about this later.

In the article that Bad Game Hall Of Fame talks about that I find interesting today, the game in question is Sword of Sodan, the creation of Finnish demo coder Søren Grønbech, an infamous game with a much longer story behind it than your typical bad game, indeed extremely long. Out of curosity, I pasted BGHoF’s discussion of it into Microsoft Word, and it came up to 67 pages! It’s got two large sets of footnotes, goes back to the Amiga demo scene and gives insight into the difficulties of developing computer games, at the time, in the state of Denmark.

Almost nothing gets through these giants’ defenses, and your encounter with them puts one on either side. As a connoisseur I must say, the frustration is *exquisite*.

Sword of Sodan for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, as it turns out, is a port of an Amiga game. Both games are extremely hard, but the Genesis version actually has more interesting design decisions behind it, in the form of its potion mixing subgame. You can hold up to four potions, each of one of four different colors, and can choose to drink any number of them at once. Drinking different combinations of potions has different effects, most good, some useless, a couple actually bad. (Hilariously, if you drink one of each color at a time your character immediately dies, and the game flashes a message on screen: “WINNERS DON’T DO DRUGS.” Gee thanks, William S. Sessions.)

Many games of the time talked the talk, but Sword of Sodan would outright kill you if you got too experimental with your potions.

67 pages is a lot to read about a game that few people might want to play, but it’s okay to skip around. I won’t tell anyone.

Bad Game Hall of Fame: Sword of Sodan

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Kaze Emanuar’s Adventures in Mario 64 Optimization: Calculating Sine

I’ve mentioned Kaze Emanuar’s efforts to make the best Mario 64 there can possibly be on its native hardware. He’s compiled it with optimization flags turned on, made its platforming engine much more efficient, and worked hard to minimize cache misses, which was a major source of slowdowns in the game’s code. Under his efforts, he’s gotten the engine running at 60fps (although not yet in a playable version of the original). While these optimizations are not the kind of thing that can keep being found indefinitely, he’s bound to run out of ways to tune up the code, currently he’s still finding new ways to speed it up.

I hope you’re ready for some F-U-N (approximation FUNctions)

He made a Youtube video detailing his most recent optimization find: getting the game’s trigonometric functions executing at their speediest. What is interesting is that the Mario 64 code already uses a couple of tricks to get sine and cosine results in a rapid manner: the game only uses 4096 discrete angles of movement direction, and contains a lookup table that covers each of those angles. But it turns out that this optimization is actually a mis-optimization, because the RAM bus hits incurred to read the values into the cache are actually more expensive than just figuring out the values in code on the N64’s hardware!

The video starts out decently comprehensible, but eventually descends into the process of figuring out sine and cosine on the fly, and the virtues of the various ways this can be done, so you can’t be faulted for bailing before the end, possibly at the moment the dreaded words “Taylor series” are mentioned. But it’s a fairly interesting watch until then!

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Satellablog: New Dumps!

Satellablog is a blog dedicated to preserving content from one of the least-documented portions of Nintendo video game history, that short period in their life where they distributed software via satellite broadcast, over the St. GIGA service.

Bounty Sword, Satellaview version
(Images from Satellablog)

Most of this stuff only exists, maybe, in company archives deep in the halls of Nintendo, and the data from the last broadcasts saved on aging flash memory cartridges held by subscribers. It is believed that all of the dumps that have been made available have come from those cartridges, and Satellaview is dedicated to finding them and making them available.

There are a number of interesting finds in this batch, including lost Dezaemon shooters, a cut-down version of Super Famicom RTS Bounty Sword, a non-playable demo of Elfaria II. But the most surprising thing in the collection is a number of dumps of a Satellaview version of Nintendo’s website circa 1999, one of the last things they made available over Satellaview! I had no idea that the service survived that long!

Satellablog: The biggest batch so far (Part 1)

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@Play: The Angband Family Tree

‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

It’s finally time. Time to reveal the maelstrom of roguelike games which has, as its center, the game of Angband.

You might be interested in our other recent columns on Angband: Re-introduction, Getting Started, and Version History.

Here is a chart of the 100-plus variants of Angband (homepage) that we know of. RogueBasin and the variants table at Tangaria were both major sources for this. You might have to right-click it and download to view it without blurring. Here’s a direct download of the PNG.

The degree to which these games have been changed from the original varies tremendously, from slightly hacks to repurposings to entire other games. In ToME, Angband was used as a base that would be completely rewritten, twice, and turned into something completely separate. Many of these games could have whole articles written about them. I’ve written at least one so far, on Zangband.

Looking through the chart, one can find two great jumping-off points from Angband’s source tree. One is PC Angband 1.3.1, largely because of being the original base of Zangband, and the other is Angband 2.8.3, which was the site of legendary maintainer Ben Harrison’s great cleanup of the code, which made it much easier to create variants than it had been.

Looking at the list, one might get the impression that this list also serves as a timeline, but that would be in error. Some variants would be updated over time, bringing in features from later in Angband’s development, and this chart doesn’t reflect that, and sometimes a game wouldn’t branch off from the newest version of the code. Please keep this in mind when looking through it.

A few interesting finds from the list:

Steamband is a complete reskinning in a kind of Jules Verne pulp steampunk style. It is what we might call a literary game, taking direct inspiration from a particular corpus of stories in the same way as Call of Cthulhu or Gygax era Dungeons & Dragons. In it, you start in a town in the center of the Earth, and try to ascend to the surface. It has some interesting ideas around the theme, but I cannot recommend it wholeheartedly because of its “race” system, which is easy to perceive as actually racist. I think its intent was to present the racial attitudes of the fiction works from which it was derived, which were really terrible, but it comes across, not to mince words, as gross these days.

There are two My Little Pony variants, based off of the “G4” version of the franchise that became meme popular for about 45 minutes of web time. Ponyband, a.k.a. My Little Angband: Dungeons Are Magic, derives from the popular 2.8.3 branch; Anquestria got its basis from the later 3.2.0.

ToME, a fairly popular variant, has the distinction of not only having a living homepage, but is also available on Steam and GoG. It has a free version, but other features are available to paying players. It’s a game that’s changed a great deal over time, starting out as Tales of Middle Earth. Now, little of its Tolkien basis remains, and its name has been retconned into “Tales of Maj’Eyal,” because you gotta have an apostrophe. Its page vaguely gives it an air of being an MMORPG, but I think it’s still a strictly single-player game. It is a game that, judging from comments, there is a great deal to get stuck into, but to my eyes it has a lost the simplicity of its origin, and it’s not an easy game to pick up. It is still under development though, and that is beyond laudatory for a game of its age and lineage.

Ironband is a challenge variant, intended to make the original game even harder. An “ironman” mode, preventing the player from going upstairs, forcing them to descend ever deeper, is part of the base game now. Ironband dates back to 2012, which may be before this mode was added, although I cannot date its inclusion conclusively right now. But whether is or not, by devoting itself to this mode of play, it is free to be completely redesigned around it. So, Ironband has streamlines the game in its service, removing races and classes, and giving the player all of their options at once. After the start of the game, there are no shops at all; everything the player gains after that point must come from the dungeon floor. Because all characters can use all things, there’s much fewer completely useless items. The “stat gain floor” phenomenon, where you have to grind on certain floors to get necessary potions to improve your attributes or risk almost certain death, has also been alleviated. Because dungeon progress is one way, it refreshes the skill points that your abilities require upon entering a new level, which is an interesting play decision: if you run out of SP, you can get them back by advancing a floor, but at the cost of increasing the game’s difficulty, possibly earlier than you’d want.

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The Bolo Home Page, Revived

Bolo is a multiplayer tank game, originally for the BBC Micro but remade for classic Macintosh computers. It was a very popular online kind of game for awhile.

It had a popular resource page on the internet, called the Bolo Home Page, made by Joseph Lo and and Chris Hwang, that began as a student project and migrated to the site lgm.com. But then that site went down, and its domain was bought by squatters. So it goes.

Well, vga256 on Mastodon has remade the Bolo Home Page out of the records kept by the Internet Archive. A site composed of hundreds of static HTML pages has risen from the ashes, all (well most) links fixed up to point internally, its content restored as much as is possible. The Internet Archive, for all its greatness, frequently misses images and even whole pages, so there are holes in its record.

Still, most of its content remains. For people who wish to learn about this classic piece of electronic entertainment, a collection of hundreds of pages awaits you!

I’ve never played Bolo myself, I don’t know much about it, but some people it seems were very enthusiastic about it. I don’t think gameplay goes obsolete, it just falls into and out of fashion. Maybe this is a sign. Maybe it’s time for the Second Age of Bolo to begin.

The Bolo Home Page (restored)

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St1ka’s Youtube Channel

St1ka is a Portugese Youtube creator who has retro gaming as his stomping grounds.

St1ka’s “INCREDIBLE” series. You might notice something(s) these thumbnails all have in common.

They generally do good work, although sometimes they include unexpected games in a series? As an example, their video on Forgotten 16-Bit games includes DOS and Amiga titles that are often not considered part of the bitness wars, PC Engine games that should rightfully be considered 8-bit, and even a couple of romhacks, which are a whole infested kettle. Once you start including romhacks your field has gotten large enough that you could likely never be done including things. And their monotonous vocal presentation grates quickly. Still though, they do their research, and the information is good.

Something else you’ve probably noticed from the thumbnails above is that St1ka’s not at all above focusing on female skin as clickbait, in such a way that it sometimes makes one feel vaguely creepy when loading his videos. It’s not a huge portion of the content, although the 16-bit compilation does feature as one of its subjects the Super Famicom title Princess Minerva which is a bit, as they say, sus. He admits to doing this in the Modern NES Games video, which, fair? Youtube is a content meat grinder and people try different things to be noticed. Also, the titles are a bit incendiary once in a while, in a style that many Youtubers use, and that often turns me away from a video.

Still, the amount of content that St1ka’s provides may overcome the negatives for you. He certainly cares about the subject. It’s a fun series, and it’s very likely to point you to some titles you’ve never heard of before. I leave the question of clicking through up to you.

St1ka’s Channel (Youtube) – 29 Incredible Modern NES Games (45 minutes) – Incredible 16-bit Hidden Gems You Never Played (44 minutes) – Forgotten 8-bit Games You Never Played (41 minutes)

The Modern NES Games video provides no information on where to get these titles! I believe strongly in accessible text, so here is where they can be found and what they are. If you choose to pore through this, or watch the video linked above, you’ll quickly discover that not all of these are actually “INCREDIBLE.” Blame St1ka for the discrepancy.

Gold Guardian Gun Girl – While there’s a free demo version (Pixiv registration required), the full version is only provided in physical form, where it’s fairly pricey (around $60, but currently out of stock everywhere I looked). It’s homepage is in Japanese, and has links to where they sell it (when it’s available).
Alfonzo’s Arctic Adventure – While made for the NES, it’s sold on Steam, Xbox, and Switch ($5). Limited Run Games sells it on physical cart ($60).
Eyra: The Crow Maiden – Sold for $10 for a computer-playable version, $30 for a cart (either NES or Famicom), or $50 for a cart and a box. It was the subject of a Kickstarter campaign.
F-Theta – Sold for $60.
Alwa’s Awakening – A highlight of the video, it’s available in many places. Its home page lists them all, usually for $10. Of particular note is Steam, Switch and itch.io. While the original is made in a retro style, the actual NES version is on Steam, GoG and itch.io, also typically for $10.
Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril – Can’t yet be bought for emulation, it’s available as a standalone game on Switch and Xbox.
Battle Kid 2: Mountain of Torment – Appears to be out of print everywhere.
Blade Buster: Available for free at romhacking.net.
Chumlee’s Adventure: The Quest For Pinky – A reference to Pawn Stars, it’s for sale at itch.io for $10.
Jay & Silent Bob: Mall Brawl – $15 on Switch and Steam.
Astro Ninja Man – out of print, not legally available anywhere currently.
Astro Ninja Man DX – for sale on physical cart for 5,490 yen. Also, an arcade version is currently available, if you have $523 to spare for a kit and an exA-Arcadia system to run it on.
Fire And Rescue – $5 on itch.io.
Steins Gate – Was released as an extra along with the Switch version of Stein’s Gate Elite, which is $60.*
Legends of Owlia – Home page. Was available physically, but not anymore. The rom could be downloaded officially for free, but the link’s now broken. It’s been officially delisted. There’s an unlisted demo on Steam. It’s implied that they are okay with downloading it, if you can find it. Hey makers, if you’re reading this! Throw it up on itch.io and make a few extra bucks! You could make it pay what you want! There is no shame in that.
Gaplus – St1ka misspells it as Galplus. This was included as an extra on Namco Museum Archives Volume 2, on Switch, Xbox, Playstation 5 and Steam. But the whole package is $20, which is a lot for a port of a semi-obscure arcade game. I suspect this is actually an unreleased game from the Famicom days. The Mermaid will probably cover the arcade version someday. Also, if you’re going to plunk $20 for a collection of basic NES games, get the one that contains Pac-Man Championship Edition, that one rocks.
L’abbaye Des Morts – Please don’t ask me to pronounce it. Made, and remade, for a variety of platforms. A NES port is name-your-price on itch.io.
Jim Power: The Lost Dimension – Another game with versions for several platforms. $20 on Steam will get you versions for PC, SNES and Genesis, and the NES version is coming to that eventually. It’s also on Switch, and they sell some of these versions on physical media on Limited Run Games.
Gotta Protectors: Amazon’s Running Diet – Did I post about this before? Looks like I haven’t, possibly due to the conspicuous T&A factor. (We have some pride.) This was a basic NES game released to promote the latest release (Switch) in the Gotta Protectors series, which are a fun mixture of Gauntlet and Tower Defense, made by venerable game development house Ancient. The rom for Amazon’s Running Diet is free, but the official download link is hard to spot on the Japanese page of its creator-look for the image that says “Download English Version.” They made an updated version, Amazon’s Training Road, but it was only as a physical cart, and it’s no longer for sale.
Project Blue – Available for $10 on itch.io, or $40 physically.
Micro Mages – Physical for $40, on Steam or itch.io for $10.
Mystic Origins – A prototype for an in-development successor, also for the NES, called Mystic Searches. Available on physical media for $50.
Almost Hero – $50 on physical media. Why are so many of these only available on cartridges? I feel like they’re severely limiting their reach. I’m sure there are warez versions out there somewhere, but I figure, if they’re going to release games for the NES in 2023 and choose to restrict their work to people with real systems, it’s up to them. But seriously, why? itch.io is easy! Sell for $5 and let people emulate it. Who’s going to warez a cheap thing?
City Trouble – Currently available free on their charmingly old-style website.
Full Quiet – Fairly recent, first out in February of this year. This is how to release a retro game: it’s out soon on Switch, Xbox and Steam. They should consider itch.io, though….
Rollie – Home page. Available on physical media ($60) and itch.io ($9).
What Remains – Name-your-price at itch.io. Bespoke physical carts are for sale for $80 on their site, but through email contact.
Reknum Souls Adventure is available on physical media only, on NES (50 Euro) and Dreamcast (20 Euro).
Larry and the Long Look for a Luscious Lover – A NES remake of the original Leisure Suit Larry. Was released on physical media, is not currently available.

* It has become my policy not to duplicate egregious stylization in the names of commercial products, on the grounds that no one has time for that shit. The official spelling of Steins Gate is Steins;Gate, yes with a semicolon, but I can’t even bring myself to camel-case Youtube, Playstation, or Nethack (despite not even being commercial) these days, so I toss that misuse right out of my grammatical window.

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