The Flipside of Gaming
Wonderful Mario obscurity blog Supper Mario Broth recently posted about evidence found in the cart for a playable Princess Peach in the Mario 64 remake for the Nintendo DS. Incomplete, slightly broken animations for Peach were found in the game’s data.
The original post shows the animations in motion, which includes some glitchy movement in her right arm. Maybe she was meant to hold something in it?
It’s certainly not an eternal question, but for classic game-players (I try to avoid the word gamer, ugh) it’s still a very good question: which is better, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, or Sonic the Hedgehog CD?
It’s a good enough question that even though Youtuber kiro talks’s video about the differences between them has several common things about to that I ordinarily consider flaws, that would ordinarily cause me to think not to link to it (especially its editing, its length, being drawn out, and asking leading questions), the question, and its answers, are useful enough that I’m linking to it anyway.
Because it’s really instructive to view the differences in design between the American and Japanese Sonic sequels! Yuji Naka helmed the American sequel, Sonic 2, but headed a team made largely of Americans, and although a lot of Western-made games for console Japanese consoles are bad, Sonic 2 is legitimately great! Meanwhile, IMO of course, Sonic CD has some interesting ideas and great moments (the time travel mechanic could have been awesome) but its level design is a bit lacking.
Not to seem either jingoistic, or its opposite, but it isn’t often that a mostly-American team from that time could show up a Japanese team on largely equal footing, and this is one time that it happened. But both games are very playable, and the differences are instructive of some fundamental differences in approach.
Sega was going through some internal strife at the time, which became more and more prominent in the later days of the Mega Drive/Genesis and especially in the Saturn era, and it could be argued that it meant that, while I believe the strife was largely over in the Dreamcast era, the company wasn’t in the place it could have been by that point, and it may have contributed to the system’s failure by its output not being strong enough to challenge the Playstation 2.
When Japan & America Made Different Sonic Sequels (Youtube, 21 minutes)
Arcade Mermaid is our classic arcade weirdness and obscurity column! Frequently (no promises) we aim to bring you an interesting and odd arcade game to wonder at.
It’s been awhile since the Merm has brought us something weird and fun to look at, and wow, this one’s really weird.
To get us started, you are free to interpret this as either a warning, a promise, or a money-back guarantee, but you should know going in that this is a journey that ends with this upstanding member of the community right here:
They’re a stunner, aren’t they? And they live for the great taste of robots. But let’s start from the beginning.
Hole Land is a shooter, and apparently the only game made by the Spanish company Tecfri. Wikipedia tells us it was only released in Japan, possibly because it came out in 1984, and the arcade scene in the US was falling apart.
Consider for a moment the concept. Hole Land. Land of Holes. Certainly a theme that bears contemplation. It seems that you are an invader to this land, a gaily-colored robot that runs back and forth across the bottom of the screen, that shoots upward at a horde of adorably, and understandably, angry monsters of various sorts, in order to claim it away for things that aren’t monsters, or holes.
The land itself is against you: volcanoes in the background launch rocks at your droid with suspicious accuracy, and the monsters throw bombs down at it. Getting hit by projectiles doesn’t destroy your ‘bot, it just disables it for a few seconds. A little guy runs on-screen to fix your problem and allow you to resume blasting after a short delay. If a rock hits you, it smashes your head down into your torso, and you have to push the fire button rapidly to decrush yourself.
The game consists of three boards, that cycle. In board one, the monsters (called “Silfoos”es and “Xagart”s) all run down from the top of the screen. Because it’s a classic-era arcade game, they have a odd system to their attack: They wind their way down in a curious way, akin to the Centipede, moving all the way to one side, dropping a levels, then taking another horizontal pass.
This gives you many opportunities to shoot them, but they’re a little cleverer than the standard video game oppono-target: they duck into the holes repeatedly as they pass, and your shots will miss if they’re in a hole, which is often. They’re also smart enough to stay in a hole if you keep shooting at it while it’s hidden. While they make a horizontal trip across the grid, if you hit the lead monster of a line, it causes the others to reverse direction, which may be good or bad depending on how far they’ve gotten. Unless the wave is almost over: then they progress to the bottom of the grid for a pass, then, as if dissatisfied that you haven’t killed them yet, sprint across one more time without even bothering with the holes.
If, after so many opportunities, you still haven’t fried one of them, it’ll take a run across the screen on your level. Your robot is blessed with the power of jumping, and you must leap over it to avoid losing a life.
The problems though are: you’re probably focused on shooting at its associates still falling, or dodging the bombs they throw or rocks from the volcanoes from the top of the screen, or if you’ve been hit you might not be able to jump it. If multiple monsters made it through it might not even be possible to leap over them all. If you don’t make it over a monster, it knocks the robot’s bottom half off, a type of damage your mechanical assistant seems unable to repair, so scratch one life. Helpfully, if you’ve already made it far into the wave when that happens, the game will advance you to the next level as a consolation.
Those bombs and rocks, from the monsters and volcanoes, are your biggest problems. They fall down with great speed, and bounce around too, and if one hits you when the monsters are low enough on the screen the chances are slim you’ll get repaired before one of them uses your lower half as a kickball. Despite all the chances that the monsters give you to shoot them, Hole Land is a dangerous place, and it took several tries for me to get through even the first three screens.
The second board is similar to the first. The monsters are “Kiles” and “Morfos” for some reason. The screen is a lot darker, making it harder to see the monsters and the bombs that fall down.
But then comes the third board, where the game changes up a lot. Now the grid of holes is gone, replaced by a few scattered openings, but dominated by a big imposing crater at the top of the screen. There’s some more new monsters, “Microons,” and some unnamed colleagues that I assume are also Microonian. They don’t hide in the holes, but instead parade around the screen in Galaga-like patterns, giving you a good chance to plug them as they pass by.
Sometimes they run straight down at you on their last pass, to try to overwhelm your gun before you can incinerate their monsterly asses.
On this level there are also little rat creatures that hide in the holes, waiting for the end of the level where the run in from the wings for their one pass at tearing up your droid. And there are spiders that hang down from threads, that can’t be shot, and will hold your robot in place for a few seconds if they touch you.
But all this is just in preparation for the main event: their boss.
In 1984 boss monsters were not yet in vogue, yet Hole Land certainly has a memorable one.
It’s not named in the game’s intro. I have put some effort into trying to come up with a suitable name. I thought of Testicules, rhymes with Hercules, but it looks like it’d be pronounced like “molecules.” Gonad Man is a possibility, but it’s obviously not a man; it may not even be male, technically, but Gonad Person doesn’t have the same ring. Scrotor has already been used by Mystery Science Theater 3000. As a brainstorming exercise, and for your own entertainment, I invite you to come up with your own name for this globular goblin.
Whatever its name, once it has emerged from its Hole, the fight is on. It advances straight down, slowly. Your job is to shoot out its jagged, pointy teeth, one by one. It feels like it takes multiple hits each, but in fact each tooth takes only one shot. It just has to hit it dead on; shots that don’t strike a tooth right in its middle have no effect. You also must knock out all of its lower teeth, every one, before any hits to upper teeth will register.
While you’re blasting away, it’s ominously stomping its way down towards you, KA-WUMP KA-WUMP, following your movements with its bloodshot eyes, and throwing rocks from its hands. It’s aim isn’t good, it can only really throw straight down or at specific angles to the left and right, but it can throw from either hand, and as it gets menacingly closer its rocks get harder to avoid. Hits don’t damage or destroy your robot, but they do knock it away, making you have to scramble back over to get in more shots, but likely getting back just in time to be hit by the next rock.
If it gets all the way down, it stomps to the side to catch your robot, then it eats it, its hands working with the effort of crunching it to bits:
But the best part is if you succeed in shooting out all of its teeth. While your robot jumps around in inane joy, your now toothless foe sits, defeated and sad. While it might be a grotesque testicle monster from out of a giant hole in the ground, it’s gracious in failure and acknowledges your accomplishment, with a synthesized voice no less. Civility is not dead in Hole Land!
Here is my playthrough, if you’re curious what this all looks like in action:
Better yet, you could have a look at this video from classic gaming Youtuber Zerst, who hosts plays of lots of obscure and bizarre old arcade games and whose channel was where I first found out about it, and who made it through all five difficulty levels. There is no ending other than the Congratulations screen at the end of each level; it probably cycles endlessly from there.
I don’t know if I could add much more about it than this. It’s very hard, it’s difficult knocking out all of the boss monster’s teeth before it eats you, and on later levels the volcanoes’ rock deluge is incessant. But they really don’t make them like this any more. The time window for the making of this kind of crazy arcade game was pitifully short. Even relatively simple games take so much time and person-power to construct that, unless one’s just doing it as a hobby, willfully chasing bizarre concepts will probably turn away most of the gaming public, and that’s a shame.
Well, that’s all on this one. I bid you all a fond farewell, coming from the Land of Holes!
All the gaming bigsites have been talking about Grimace’s Birthday, a promotional Gameboy Color game sponsored by McDonalds and made by Krool Toys. Here it is on IGN, and here it is on Kotaku. And, here it is on Gizmodo, and here it is on Retro Dodo.
AND, here it is on Boing Boing (still exists in 2023!), and here it is on Destructoid.
AND ALSO, here it is on Gamespot. And the mandatory ResetEra thread.
TOO, GoNintendo, NintendoWire, GameRant, KnowYourMeme (already??), MSN (also still exists) and (groan) Ycombinator.
Ars Technica linked to it as well. I love their title. It reads, “For reasons no one can fathom, McDonald’s has released a new Game Boy Color game.” Well, I think I know why. It’s an advergame. Judging by how many websites have stories about it, I think the why is freaking obvious. It’s so obvious that I would be surprised if an ad agency weren’t behind this flurry of interest by half the bigweb.
Some notes. I’ve seen people say it’s the first “official” Gameboy Color game since the system died. I suppose that’s true, but that’s really tricky language. It’s official in that McDonalds sponsored it, and it uses the McDonaldland characters with their blessing. It’s not official in that it’s supported by Nintendo. It doesn’t have the “Official Nintendo Seal,” and it’s not being released on physical media. Although it was made as a Gameboy Color rom, and can be played on actual hardware using a flashcart or if someone put it on chips (in such a way as to get past Nintendo’s hardware check) and made a cartridge of it, but nearly everyone will play this as a webgame, on maker Krool Toys’ website.
(Why the bay, take a look at the site design on both of those pages, they’re totally earlyweb relics! I am not complaining; in fact, I love them fiercely. Do not get between me and those sites!)
All of this is of course part of McDonalds’ promotion where they’re cerebrating the Grimace’s birthday, an affair that involves purple milkshakes. In a whole post of surprising revelations, the biggest one is that they remember they have McDonaldland characters to begin with, as they’ve been gathering dust for over a decade.
Anyway, it’s not a bad game. It’s mostly interesting for the novelty value. It won’t win any rewards, but it’s a perfect ordinary timed GBC inertial platformer. It’s mostly notable for McDonalds’ temerity in sponsoring it, but I suppose Nintendo doesn’t much care anymore about the integrity of their (oh frog) twenty-five year old hardware’s library.
Boo the hey: no one paid us for this post, but we’re not against making thousands of dollars. McDonalds, call us.
Retro Game Mechanics Explained generally does interesting videos, I find. The details on how the ghosts (monsters) in Pac-Man behave when dangerous are fairly well understood now, thanks to the work of Jamey Pittman in writing The Pac-Man Dossier. RGMEx did a summary video of that work three years ago.
The question of how vulnerable ghosts move, after Pac-Man has eaten a Power Pellet (Energizer), isn’t covered in as much detail. It’s still as accurate as the rest of the information in the document, but its implications are left for the reader to explore. Well, RGMEx has explored it.
Vulnerable ghosts move pseudo-randomly, through an interesting process. The game has a RNG (random number generator) that’s reset at the start of every level, that cycles through a period of 8,192 values. Vulnerable ghost movement is the only thing in the game that it’s used for, but it isn’t applied directly. Instead, it’s used as a pointer into the game’s own code, and the value of the address it finds is used to determine how the ghost moves.
A result of this is that not all directions are chosen equally. But further, and more importantly, if the direction chosen isn’t available, the ghost tries the next direction in a clockwise order. If that one’s not possible, it tries the next, until it finds one that works.
These two facts combine to give a definite bias to the directions that frightened ghosts move. Retro Game Mechanics Explained then ran the numbers and figured out where scared ghosts tend to go. It’s interesting, even slightly useful, information.
News flash: there is one UmJammer Lammy Now arcade machine remaining in the world!
News flash: by the way, there used to be an UmJammer Lammy arcade machine!
The news of both comes to us from the account of Youtuber UnEricYockey (12 minutes), in the form of a short documentary on the game’s history and, due to poor performance on location test, what is probably its sole surviving unit:
We recently posted about Rodney Greenblat’s early obscure Playstation title Dazzeloids, made a year or two before his and Nana-On Sha’s breakout hit Parappa the Rapper. Parappa became something of a media franchise, spawning a much-overdue sequel on the Playstation 4 and an anime series. UmJammer Lammy was Parappa’s original sequel, that brought the same kind of call-and-response gameplay to guitars.
UmJammer Lammy starred Lammy, an insecure young lamb and front-woman for the band Milkcan, who becomes a rock goddess when a guitar is in her hands. Play structure is similar to Parappa, giving the player a series of increasingly unlikely situations that they have to escape somehow by playing music: a dream, putting out a fire, taking care of babies, flying an airplane, making a chainsaw sculpture, and escaping Hell itself (or, getting off an island, in overseas versions), before ending with the most dire situation of all: a public performance in front of a stadium full of people. Yikes! You can do it Lammy!
Production values were a bit less than Parappa, but Lammy and her friends were, indeed are, still engaging and wonderful, and the PS1 game is worth giving a try if you’re at all a fan of Parappa and his world. You can play as Parappa in an unlockable mode after you win, and all of the game’s tracks were mixed as funky remakes! Sadly I can tell you that Parappa’s lines had nowhere near as much flow as they did in his first game, but speaking as one of the few US players who bought a copy of UmJammer Lammy, jamming with her is a great time.
That should be enough information on Lammy’s game. But, how did UmJammerLammy Now come about? The video tells us that the Namco System 12 arcade board is pretty much an original Playstation in an arcade format, and Namco wanted to get some games in Japanese arcades quickly to compete with Konami’s rhythm game dominance.
While the gameplay of the arcade version is similar to the PS1 edition, there are some notable differences, including a surprising number of extra cutscenes featuring the various business ventures of Joe Chin, the antagonist of Parappa the Rapper. The arcade game has been dumped for preservation purposes, and all of its cutscenes are demonstrated in a Youtube video, also on UmEricYockey’s channel (23 minutes):
There’s so much weird Parappa lore in this weird and obscure arcade game! And Lammy’s crippling social anxiety truly makes her a heroine for our age.
Found the last Um Jammer Lammy NOW! (Youtube, 12 minutes)
Um Jammer Lammy NOW!- 4K Arcade Cutscenes & Attract Sequence (Youtube, 23 minutes)
I don’t see as many fan shrine sites as I used to. Old ones have died out or, in the best case, gone into archive mode, and new ones aren’t replacing them as quickly, or at least don’t seem to be. It could be I don’t search for them as often, or Google not surfacing them as much-not only has the quality of its search degraded markedly over the past decade, but for whatever reason its results seems much more focused on answering questions and selling things. Google also seems a lot more like to give you links from big sites, instead of small web sites made by individuals.
That’s why I was please to find 6th Division Den, a site focused on Metal Slug that the Wayback Machine suggests was founded as recently as 2018. I didn’t find it through Google, but as the host of the official site of the game from yesterday’s post, Aqua Ippan.
Much of the site’s content is devoted to creating pixel art and on getting the images out of the games, but it has a lot of examples to go by. And the site itself looks great! I don’t see many sites like this anymore, but I’m glad they can still be found from time to time.
6th Division Den, Metal Slug fandom and resource site
Indie Retro News reported recently on this cool run-and-gun game made by Division ĺ… the style of Metal Slug. Here’s a promotional video. Note that some of the sound effects are taken directly from Metal Slug, but are intended as placeholders. The final version should have no outside assets.
Aqua Ippan demo (itch.io, $0) – Official Site
We’ve brought up a couple of examples of Commodore PET software lately, which as I keep saying, is interesting because the PET has no way of doing bitmapped graphics, sprites, or even definable characters. Its characters are locked in ROM and cannot be changed. So, it includes a set of multi-purpose characters that was used throughout all the Commodore 8-bit line, even as late as the C64 and C128, which having definable graphics didn’t need these kinds of generic graphics characters, but they were still useful for people who didn’t want to create their own graphics.
Back on my Commodore coding days I became very familiar with these characters. I think they’re much more universally-applicable for graphic use than the IBM equivalent, the famous Code Page 437, although that’s mostly because PETSCII doesn’t bother defining supporting so many languages. Code Page 437 also uses a lot of its space for single and double-line versions of box-drawing characters, although on the other hand it doesn’t waste characters defining reverse-video versions of every glyph.
PETSCII has:
There are resources that let you use PETSCII to create old-school computer art, like this PETSCII editor, Petmate and Playscii, and for a bunch of examples of what you can do with it you can browse through the Twitter account PETSCIIBots. And this blog post from 2016 both makes the case for PETSCII as a medium for art and provides some great examples of it.
We love games made for unlikely hardware, and PETSCII Bros. fits that bill like a duck’s dentures. Like we explained in the post about that PET demo from a while ago, the PET didn’t have changeable graphics characters and no bitmap mode at all, and so it wasn’t what we’d consider a games machine. But it did come with a set of interesting graphics characters that, among other things, had a set of 16 characters that let programmers use the screen as a super-low-res 80×50 pixel display.
PETSCII Bros is a PET action game that uses those characters (long called “PETSCII” as a cheeky reference to ASCII) for an actual game, that plays similarly to Nintendo’s classic Mario Bros. arcade game. Of course you’ll need a PET, or an emulator (such as the one that comes with VICE) to play it. Or if you’re just passing interested, you could watch this video to see how it works:
PETSCII Bros. (for the Commodore PET, itch.io, $0)
The title is no joke, a couple of crazy people RetroGL and JoneGG, are actually doing it, and while they’re close to a final release you can also download a current alpha for free, with manual, from links in the description on their Youtube demonstration video:
It’s a great example of playing to a system’s strengths (surprisingly large sprites and a legendary sound chip) while downplaying its limitations (only eight sprites, low multicolor resolution, 16 colors, a controller with only one button). It’s much better than the arcade porters of the system’s heyday would have accomplished. I mean, just look at it! On the Commodore 128, they even plan to implement stage scrolling!
I’m not sure how it works internally, but given that it’s being distributed as a CRT file and not a disk image, my guess is on physical hardware it’d rely on a physical cartridge for expanded, bank-switched ROM space. It’s a trick that’s being used more often, like how Champ Games uses it for their Atari 2600 ports of classic arcade games.
SNK vs CAPCOM for Commodore 64 Demonstration (Youtube, 4 minutes)
Warning: slightly NSFW for depiction of sheep birth.
What are the Dazzeloids? They’re characters created by Rodney Alan Greenblat, the character designer of Parappa the Rapper! They were made for a multimedia Playstation game released in 1994, two years before Parappa. I call it a game, but it seems more to have been one of those early multimedia products that’s mostly video clips given a loose connecting story, only in Dazzeloids case, the clips are very weird. The Dazzeloids (not Dazzleoids, as you might expect) have as their mission the liberation of minds and use creativity as a tool to that end. It’s all very nineties kids TV. The Dazzeloids are very obscure now, and don’t even appear on Rodney’s website, which is kind of a shame.
All of the Dazzeloids have a dream sequence on the disk that introduces them and tells you what they’re like, and the video above is the one for Stinkabod the Sheep, who might be the character on Lammy’s shirt. The video is very weird, but engaging, and definitely a Rodney Greenblat creation. The characters are of the same style as Parappa, and it doesn’t seem impossible that Stinkabod and his friends could exist in the same world.
Rodney’s creations are a bit more popular in Japan than in the U.S., where Parappa got an anime series and a line of merchandise. While you’re diving down this internet rabbit hole, you might also check out Rodney Greenblat’s personal site Whimsyload!