Tag: retro

Video Games 101’s Super Mario World Speedrun Guide

Between U Can Beat Video Games, Video Games 101 and other channels like that of the late SaikyoMog, there are _<i>lots</i>_ of video guides to classic games. If I linked to all of them here they’d overrun the channel. I’m considering making those links a weekly thing, like Sundry Sunday and (sporadically, these days) romhacks, to keep their numbers under control. We’ll see.

Many of these videos are very long, and sometimes multipart besides. This video, a speedrun guide for Super Mario World from VG101, is not. (18 minutes)

Of course Super Mario World is a game that’s been destroyed by speedrunning. If you set aside scripted, tool-assisted speedruns (TASes), which I usually do nowadays, there are people who have still taken advantage of glitches to warp directly to the credits from gameplay, and perform much weirder tricks besides. This video doesn’t rely on those: it’s just the most direct route from start to finish through its levels, as God and Tezuka intended.

Piccadilly Gradius

After yesterday’s exploration of a huge collection of antique electro-mechanical amusement machines, it seemed meet to drag out a little video I’ve been aware of for a while, a demonstration of a Piccadilly Circus-style redemption machine made by Konami, amusingly named Piccadilly Gradius (2 minutes).

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of this strange entry in the Gradius series on the internet, just a stub on a couple of wikis. Piccadilly Circus itself seems to be a Konami series, only a little older than Gradius really. Most of them seem to be simple roulette-style machines where you stop a light on a number to win a prize. The Gradius one makes it into a journey to get a spaceship to the end of a course.

Here’s a demonstration, I think, of one of the more-usual Piccadilly Circus games (3 minutes). It’s got charming anime-style art!

A huge old-timey penny arcade in Yorkshire

It’s hard to believe, but an “arcade” didn’t used to mean video games. Across “the pond,” to trade in ludicrous understatement, in “old blighty,” there is an amazing collection of old-style mechanical machines. Northern Introvert has an ‘alf-hour video exploration of them that makes for fascinating viewing!

Stuff on Raimais

Pretty hard to read. Is that supposed to be AAIMAIS?

Raimais is a sci-fi-focused maze game from Taito in 1988. Ryan Oliver, writing over at Hardcore Gaming 101, has written an excellent description of the game, including why you might be interested in it. Not only is it like a kind of Arkanoid-style revision of a pre-existing genre but with powerups, in this case maze games, it reminds me a lot of the early arcade and Atari 2600 game Dodge ‘Em. It’s got multiple routes and lots of secrets, including secret endings. It pulls some Druaga-style dirty tricks on the player: without a secret item, you’re doomed to get a bad ending. Even with it, you have to complete a sequence of Quick Time Events during the ending or your character gets zapped by a laser gun and just dies, no do-overs, no continues.

Furthermore, the hardest-to-reach ending was actually impossible to get! The game’s included on Taito Legends 2 from 2006, but there’s a more-recent Arcade Archives version (Switch, Playstation Store), that gives you the option of making the impossible ending possible.

This Arcade Archives trailer gives a good sense of the play without giving too much away (3 minutes):

Here’s a recap of links at the end of the HG101 article:

I’ve known about Raimais for some time, and in a reversal of the usual turn of events I had already read the gaming.moe and Sudden Desu pages before HG101 covered it. This is an excellent excuse to link to them though.

Mega Man Maker 1.10 Released (a while ago)

I’m a bit late in announcing this, but a lot’s been going on here lately, and it’s a worthy announcement, so here’s the release video for Mega Man Maker 1.10 (2 minutes). This isn’t the last time we linked to a MMM release, and its coders don’t seem to be slowing down any time soon.

A free program, it’s got the usual array of new enemies (including favorites Guts Man and Snake Man), items and music typical of MMM. A big new feature is ability capsules, which can grant new powers if found in a level, or at the creator’s option even disable them. This can let you pull off dirty tricks like making a chamber that requires the slide to enter, but that gives you a capsule that disables the slide, making it inescapable. But you wouldn’t do that, would you?

Kim Justice on I’m Sorry, Sega’s Political Arcade Game

It’s a really strange game even without the context that your protagonist, a fan-waving Japanese guy running around from sunglasses-wearing agents, and occasionally celebrities like Michael Jackson (probably his first role in a Sega game) and a barrel chasing him around mazes, is based on a real person, Kakuei Tanaka, a prime minister in Japan in the early 70s who was taken down by a bribery scandal. When he gets caught by the suits, they put on S&M garb and Tanaka gets whipped by them! Here’s Kim Justice’s report on it (19 minutes). Here’s about five minutes of gameplay.

I can vouch that it’s playable in MAME, and it’s not even that bad a game, certainly better than Abscam, a pretty terrible Pac-Man bootleg that’s probably our closest version of it.

Creator of C64OS Talks VIC-II Video Timing

It’s a pretty good run-down of the various weird timing issues of the Commodore 64. Machines at that time had to do all kinds of weird things to keep up the overriding priority of microcomputers of the time: building a consistent video signal that could be displayed on a television. Nearly all machines needed special hardware to do the job of keeping up the display, to give the CPU time to run user programs, or anything at all.

Circuit diagram from the linked article

The C64’s VIC-II video chip is a product of many compromises. The C64 could contain so much memory affordably because it used dynamic RAM, which requires periodic refreshes, and one of the tasks of the VIC-II was to handle that. It also needed access to main memory in order to build the display image.

But both of these actions conflict with whatever the processor needs to do, so the computer is designed to actually put the 6510 to sleep when the VIC-II needs to access memory. This is why, when the screen is blanked, the machine runs a little faster and more consistently, and that’s why the screen is blanked when a connected Datasette is loading programs from cassette tape.

VIC-II and FLI timing (part 1 of 3, c64os.com)

Use a GBA as a Switch Controller, No Fooling

It is true, but you do need some extra items. Not only the Gameboy Advance, but a Gamecube, a GBA controller cable, the Gamecube controller adaptor (the one made to support Smash Bros. games) and a Gameboy Player with boot disk. But if you have all of these items, none of them need to be modded. It’s all Nintendo code and hardware, baby!

The process is to boot the Gamecube and Gameboy Player with the GBA plugged into it with the cable. Then turn off the Gamecube leaving the Gameboy Advance on, disconnect the GBA cable from the GC, then plug it into the Gamecube adapter plugged into a USB port connected to the Switch. If the GBA is still powered on, it should be usable as a Switch controller at that point, until it’s turned off!

If you don’t have them all that kit, a modded GC or Wii will also suffice for the Gameboy Player. It’s all demonstrated in NotRealEric’s video. There is also some alternate hardware usable, including third-party adapters and connectors. The video is ten minutes long, but the setup is in the first 3½ minutes of it; the rest is demonstrating some use cases, including Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

The hardest to find of these devices now, if you don’t use modded hardware, is the Gameboy Player, which is quite expensive used. But if you do happen to have all the pieces, it’s quite the hack. It seems to work due to a controller-emulation program the Gameboy Player (or modded GB or Wii running mGBA) sends to the GBA, which, amazingly, is Switch compatible.

Maybe you have a magic combination of gizmos lying around to use this trick, and use a GBA as an extremely limited Switch peripheral? Yeah, let’s not kid ourselves, this is pretty silly and doesn’t have a strong use case, considering that Switches come with two Joycons, but it’s amazing that it works at all.

Kim Justice’s 10 Arcade Treasures From 1982

Kim Justice has done a few of these videos and they usually have interesting games to look into. They try to present machines that aren’t as well-known to current eyes, so you’ll probably find at least one new favorite in each of their videos. Here it is (32 minutes):

The games presented are: Mr. Do!, Frenzy, Anteater, Nibbler, Kangaroo, Bagman, The Pit, Blue Print, Jack the Giant Killer and Abscam. I personally vouch for Mr. Do, Anteater, Nibbler and Bagman. A surprising fact revealed is that Midway’s Blue Print was actually an early production of Tim and Chris Stamper, long before Rare, and even before Ultimate: Play the Game!

The Ultimate Gameboy Talk

It’s a busy day for me coming up, so here’s one from my list of Youtube links: the Ultimate Gameboy Talk (1 hour 1 minute) by Michael Steil, but you don’t have to watch it on YT, as it’s also hosted on the website of Chaos Computer Club in various formats. The embed below is from Youtube though, since they usually have pretty good embedding:

This “ultimate” talk is ultimately about the hardware, its internals and quirks, and tricks that can be pulled off in it. Sure, it’s very technical and extremely geeks, but that’s pretty much the standard around these parts. Enjoy!

MADE’s Fundraiser

MADE is the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, a San Francisco-based video game museum loaded with playable examples. They’re trying to raise $500,000 to secure operations funding for the next three years. I’ve never been to it, but I’ve had at least one worthy person recommend them to me today, and so I decided to help spread the word. (Info link, fundraiser link)

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You gotta love a museum with a sign out front reading “Play Retro Games Here.” If I was in San Fran, I’d probably never leave the place.

The fundraising seems to be going slowly at the moment, which is a shame. They’re at just 2% of their goal. Please, if you have some spare change, you could probably do worse than to throw it their way. And spread the word if you can!

“Children love our classes!” Well I’d expect so, they’re a video game museum!

Luxocrates’ Project to Get C64 Commando Music Running On Arcade

I am back from DragonCon, but got hit by a staggering blow from life (which I will not mention the details of here) that’s going to take me a long time to recover from. So in the meantime, please enjoy this 19 minute video in which someone on Youtube describes his plan to get arcade Commando (a.k.a. “Wolf of the Battlefield”) to play Ron Hubbard’s excellent soundtrack from the C64 port.

Arcade Command didn’t have bad music at all, but Ron Hubbard’s score is generally regarded to outshine it. The two hardware platforms are really different: the C64 has a 6502-workalike and the legendary SID chip, while the arcade version used a custom platform. This is a first video in a projected series, so at this point we don’t even know if he’ll be successful. Let’s hope.