Set Side B

Getting Started in DE’s Remake of Wizardry I

Wizardry hates you

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, a.k.a. Wizardry I, is a classic and venerable CRPG from the early days of computer gaming. It’s thought to be the very first computer RPG where you played as a party of more than one character. Even the early PLATO RPGs didn’t have a single player control a whole group like that.

Wizardry took D&D as its inspiration in ways that now even D&D itself doesn’t know. Its Armor Class value counts down like it did in olden times. And death is meant to stick, and be costly to recover from. Dead characters can fail to be revived, which turns them to ash and costs even more to fix. And that can fail too, and the character is just gone.

Pit traps in the dungeon have no counter, most of them have no hint they’re waiting there, their damage scales with the dungeon level so they’re nearly always a danger, and frequently kill your mage characters. Yet, they are not the worst the game has to offer, especially when you get to the second game, which contains what may be the single cruelest trap ever put into a computer game, and I am not exaggerating.

Then there’s the mazes themselves. They’re tricky, and although there are many quality-of-life improvements in the new game, including an automap, the game purposely doesn’t protect you from its map-foiling tricks. If you get teleported or spun around, the game’s automap won’t notice, and it’ll mess up your map! This is by design, because playing Wizardry with an infallible map is a hugely different experience. You’re supposed to get confused.

So you see, Wizardry hates you.

Wizardry doesn’t hate you that much

These stories are frightening, enough that I imagine they’ve scared some players away from the game. But despite (and in a way, because of) them, Wizardry is still a lot of fun to play. For the first seven experience levels characters grow gratifiyingly quickly, and the play, due to its challenge and its consequences, is rarely boring. The original game underwent a year of playtesting before it was released to the Apple II-owning public, and the balance bourne of that time and work shines through. Wizardry is still a fun game to play, and while many of Digital Eclipse’s changes to adopt the game to current tastes are appreciated, I’m not convinced they’re all positive ones. It is what it is though, and I want to emphasize, what that is, is still fun.

Make backup saves of your game

Still though, one change that I can only regard as positive is that it’s really easy to make a backup copy of your save file. This isn’t just anyone telling you this! It’s me! I wrote a roguelike column for years for GameSetWatch insisting that permadeath was okay and that players shouldn’t back up save files to avoid it! But roguelikes are designed to be replayed many times, and anyway are usually pretty short so your time investment can’t become too large. Wizardry is not a long game, but it isn’t short either.

While Wizardry’s mazes don’t change, the game can throw all kinds of enemy parties against you, and even advanced parties once in a while get screwed over by the RNG. It is a rite of passage to rescue a deceased group one or two members at time from the dungeon, but it gets old after the first time or two. I don’t suggest winding back time every time a character dies, I think that’s going too far. But it will save you if, say, a character fails their revive from ash roll, or your party wipes beneath a set encounter space.

Backing up your save on the Apple II meant backing up you Scenario Disk, was a time-consuming option. Here, Digital Eclipse outright encourages you to make a copy of your save. The option is right there on the file menu, and I encourage you to use it too.

Use Old-School Creation and Advancement Rules

Under Old-School Options, you should use the original game’s character creation and stat advancement rules. I played through most of the game with the updated rules under the impression that they would take the edge off the difficulty, not knowing that these two actually make the game harder.

Character creation gives each character lineage (formerly called race, a term that’s become more loaded since 1981) set stats, and a number of points to distribute between them. The new system gives all characters a flat 12 points to spend. Under the old system character creation system, most characters got between 7 and 10 points to distribute, but 10% of the time would get ten extra points, and there’s a slim chance to get even more. Players could reroll endlessly to get bonus points in the range of 17 to 20, which was a huge boost! 10% of the time really isn’t that uncommon, and stats matter quite a lot in Wizardry, so it wasn’t hard to give all your characters a substantial boost right out of the gate, enough to start with a Samurai.

Of the other option, “Point Buy” on gaining a level, the new rule gives characters 1 to 3 points in stats of the player’s choosing upon reaching a new experience level. The old rule gives each stat a chance to advance, based on the character’s Age/Vim, with a chance that it could go down as well. The possibility of losing a point should be considered, but often characters gain four or five points upon level gain. It’s more a matter of taste, but I’ve had good experiences with it, at least at low levels.

Of the other option, “Point Buy” on gaining a level, the new rule gives characters 1 to 3 points in stats of the player’s choosing upon reaching a new experience level. Each has about equal chance, so it averages out to two points, which is really low generally, and even lower if you aspire to creating a Lord (a range of stats from 12 to 15) or a Ninja (all 17 or above).

Fortunately, you don’t have to stick with one option or the other, but can switch between them when you want. If you have a character who’s closing in on Lordship or Ninjahood, but just needs a couple of more points in a specific stat to obtain it, you can switch to the new style just before claiming that character’s next experience level, and even switch back afterward.

Creating characters

The game offers you to start you out with a group of pre-made characters of an appropriate mix and starting out at Level 2. I whole-heartedly suggest that you don’t use them.

Wizardry is not a game about helping an Overlord get an amulet back from a wizard. The quest is largely bunk; while Werdna is definitely not on your side, there’s is nothing in the game to suggest that Trebor is in the right either. No, Wizardry is a game about watching your characters grow through adventures, and overcome hardships, and possibly succeed in a great challenge. You really want to make your own characters for this.

While Level 1 characters are very fragile, and somewhat disposable, they’re yours. Under the new rules reviving Level 1 characters is free, and it doesn’t take them many fights to advance to Level 2, where they’re sturdier, and at Level 3 your group even starts learning good spells. Make your whole group and stick it out, you’ll have more fun.

Even once your group starts exploring the dungeon and gets a few levels under their belt, the game will continue to offer you new, randomly-generated extras, with levels approaching those of your highest-level character, in the Tavern. These can be useful as a B-team, to supplement your group if you want to play around with different party compositions, and to help rescue your own characters if they wipe in the dungeon. The original game didn’t have them, and they’re expensive to hire, but they can come in handy.

Party composition

In many classic party-based CRPGs in the Wizardry style, the ideal party is pretty obvious: a fighter, a thief, a cleric and a mage. Wizardry doesn’t buck that trend entirely, the game seems designed around three fighters, a thief, a priest and a mage, but there are interesting tactical possibilities that can be explored with non-standard party composition, and since the game lets you have up to 20 characters on your roster in total and switch them in and out of your main group at any time in town, you can even try them out without restarting your whole game.

Here are some ideas:

The basics: Figher x 3, Thief, Priest, Mage makes it harder for the monsters to break through that crunchy front line to get to the tasty low-HP classes behind them.
Go thiefless: I go over this below, in the section of Chests and Traps. In short, you have to forego a lot of treasure, but having an extra priest or mage lets your group rule in other ways.
Any number of Samurai instead of Fighters: it isn’t hard to make a Samurai in initial character creation, and that’s actually the recommended way to play one, since when a character changes classes their stats in play, they are all lowered tremendously. Samurai start out with more HP than Fighters, but earn slightly less with each level. But in return, they start learning Mage spells at level 4, giving you a few extra uses of DUMAPIC, and eventually MAHALITO, which can make a big difference against some enemy groups.
Having a Bishop instead of a Priest. I don’t suggest this one so much unless the Bishop is an extra character, because getting to higher tier spells as soon as possible is hugely important and Bishops, although they learn both spell types, get them more slowly. They do have the Identify ability though, which saves you a lot of gold at the Trading Post, and makes selling spare equipment found in the dungeon a reliable source of extra funds.

The most important stat for each class is the obvious one: Strength for Fighter types, Agility for Thieves, Piety for Priests and Intelligence for Mages. But after that, for front liners it’s Vitality, and for spellcasters it’s Agility.

However, Vitality increasess HP and helps the front line hold together for longer, since when the back rank falls into it they tend to get eaten quickly. But every class is helped by Vitality, it increases the chance of revival success, and it’s not a bad idea to add some to your Mages for when dragon breath or an enemy MAHALITO gets through.

Agility affects when a character acts in combat, and it’s important that those huge group-size damage spells happen early in the first round before the enemy has the chance to act. The best fight is the one that ends before the monsters get a single turn.

About VIM, a.k.a. AGE

Wizardry has a check on resting too much. Whenever a character stays at the Inn, they lose a tiny bit of VIM. It’s not enough to show on-screen, we’re talking about a small fraction of a point. In the original game it was called AGE, and started around 18 and counted up. You can switch to that name in the Old-School Rules. Each Inn stay is a week of time, although strangely it only counts for the characters who actually stay at the Inn. So long as you try to make the most of your expeditions into the dungeon your characters won’t age much, but the higher their age grows, the greater the chance (if you’re playing by Old-School stat level gain rules) that stats will go down. And if characters get very old, into their 50s, they could just die, period.

The higher a character’s VIM/lower their AGE, the less of a chance they’ll lose stats when playing with random stat gains, but it’s really subtle unless you class change multiple times.

When characters are revived from death, they age by a random amount that could be up to a year. When characters chance classes, they age considerably, by several years! So it’s best not to change classes lightly.

It’s said, of an early release of Apple II Wizardry, that if you quit the game while in the dungeon, and you resume their advenutres by restarting them as an “Out” Party, that the game would age them by ten years. I’ve only heard of this by rumor, and it seems to indicate that this was changed in later releases. I tell you this just to say, even the original designers thought better of that one.

There’s a lot more to say about playing Wizardry! Watch out for more soon, I still have to get some of my notes organized. We’ll talk about how the game actually plays, and give a plan for tackling the dungeon overall.

EDIT: I repeated myself at one point, so I fixed some wording there. Also some minor fixes elsewhere. I notice that the theme is covering some of the text with my screenshots. I’m not sure why it’s doing that. We’re looking into it.

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Frank Herbert’s Book on Computers

Frank Herbert, of course, is the person who created and wrote the first Dune books. You remember Dune, don’t you? Paul Atreides, Muad’Dib, Bene Gesserit, Baron Harkonen, etc? Notably, in the backstory to his sci-fi epic masterpiece, there was a time called the Butlerian Jihad, where all computers and robots were destroyed and it was declared taboo to create a machine to do the thinking of a human being. These days, doesn’t seem like such a bad idea!

Well he was a bit of a tech enthusiast at the time, and he wrote a book about computers, possibly to try to not get too full of themselves, entitled “Without Me You’re Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers.” The computers in question are Apple IIs and Atari 8-bits, so it may seem kind of quaint today. Also, the link is on the Internet Archive, and it’s one of those funky books that you have to “check out,” for about an hour, because every viewed copy is backed up by a physical edition they have in holding. You know, because publishers suck!

Still, for periods of an hour at a time, it is a portal into a simpler time, where computers typically had 64 kilobytes of memory or less. Will they inspire you to destroy all thinking machines and train a cadre of people to do complex math in their heads? I’m going to guess no, even though Apple products are one of the subjects of the book. In order to be inspired really loathe computers, I think you have to have at least a 300-baud modem.

Without me you’re nothing: the essential guide to home computers, by Frank Herbert (archive.org, 307 pages[!], readable for periods of one hour at a time)

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The MAD Magazine Type-In Program

One of the essences of comedy and humor is a shared context between participants. When a joke is made both the teller and the hearer must know what’s being spoken of, and how the elements fit together in relation to each other, if the funny ha-ha is to occur.

Which is why I find the creation of The MAD Computer Program interesting. Published on issue 258 in BASIC for four of the microcomputer platforms of the time, Atari 8-bit, Apple II, Commodore 64 and IBM PC, it was obviously MAD’s bid to maintain technically relevant to that brief moment in computing history. Setting aside whether it’s actually funny or not (it’s not), it means that MAD’s editors must have decided that home computers were common enough that they could waste some of their precious print pages on catering to their owners. Anyone without one of those computers would find them to be four pages of wasted content.

The four programs have a lead-in that reads in a set of data (using READ commands to get vector coordinates from DATA statements, of course). The lead-in part is different for each platform, but the lines with the DATA statements are the same, and so are only printed once in the magazine. That’s also the least interesting part of the ordeal of entering type-in programs: tables of raw data, numbers without context, sequences of values that will put your monkey brain to sleep, yet will surely cause your code to fail catastrophically if entered incorrectly. There’s 140 lines of them to enter here, plus some more if you’re using a C64. As my eyes brush over them, childhood trauma from entering type-ins from computer magazines cause them to water involuntarily. I miss the age of magazine-supplied type-in programs, but not that part of it.

What do you get when you spend a grueling half-hour typing in two pages of numbers written by a group who describes themselves as a gang of idiots? Something genuine useful like Compute’s Speedscript word processor? A unique and interesting two-player game like Basketball Sam & Ed or Laser Chess? The author of the text of the piece is coy about what the result will be, but encourages readers to send a printout to the MAD offices. I wonder how many did? Probably not too many; a thread on the AtariAge forums implies that there’s an error in the listing that causes the program to crash about two-thirds the way into its run. One participant remembers that MAD published a correction a few issues later, but if they actually did I can’t say.

If someone does get it to work, what then? If you’re familiar with MAD you might can already guess what the result, a picture drawn in hi-res on your screen, will be, but to save you the effort of setting up an emulator and entering over a thousand numbers one at a time, here’s a Youtube video of the program in action:

The preview gives it away. WHAT, ME WORRY? It’s a pretty good representation!

The video links to the blog post on Meatfigher.net that I learned about the program from. Meatfighter’s a pretty cool little blog and it’s worth rummaging through their archives! atariprojects.org offers an emulator disk image with the program already entered for you. dougx.net offers a version of the program written in Javascript that renders its output in your browser window. Without the (relatively) low resolution of the ancient computers that ran the original programs I feel the result loses something, but at least you don’t have to type it in yourself.

The MAD Computer Program (meatfighter.net)
Video of output from the MAD Computer Program (Youtube, 1 1/2 minutes)

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Snafaru’s Wizardry Fanpage

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….

Snafaru’s Wizardry Fanpage is a lot newer than most of the sites that get featured here under the Oldweb heading (see left/above), the earliest viewable version of the site on the Wayback Machine is from 2011, practically a baby at 13 years old. Yet it has some renown: I mentioned that I was playing Digital Eclipse’s wonderful remake, and someone on Mastodon pointed the site out to me. I then forgot about it, but then found it again through web search. Lucky! And it’s still being updated! If you keep your website up and updated for 13 years you deserve a PRIZE.

In addition to information on the original games, Snafaru maintains a scenario editor for Wizardry, and hosts a number of fanmade scenarios on their site. Wizardry is much older than even the blog, it was first published in 1981, 43 years ago. A game that maintains a fandom that long is amazing, even more so when its publisher went under so long ago.

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The 30th Anniversary Edition of the Game of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I’m trying to include these timelines whenever I make a post about something that’s gone on for a bit

Okay, this is mostly from memory, so here goes. And it’s impossible to talk

about this subject without launching into a discursive and random mode of writing that may be funny but often comes off as annoying if one doesn’t have the writing skill of a Footlights alum who was friends with the Pythons (Monty) and once script-edited for classic Doctor Who. I apologize for that, but understand that reading the book version in large part warped my writing style for decades. I think I’ve gotten better since then, but I doubt it.

So in the beginning Douglas Adams created a hilarious sci-fi comedy radio show called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Then there was an album, then a TV show, then most improbably, a text adventure game from Infocom back at their height. One might think, surely a movie is next, right? And you’d be correct (2005), but because Hollywood is a twisty maze of executives all alike, only after 13 years after the last book had passed (1992), along with the life of Douglas Adams (2001), and somehow from the Disney company (still around).

The history of the whole thing is involved, and I already covered much of it in a previous post. This post is just to point out the updated, 30th Anniversary edition of the web version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the BBC’s website. It replaced the 20th Anniversary edition. If they keep to the pattern, there should soon be a 40th Anniversary edition, but there’s been no sight of one yet.

Web version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide text adventure game on the BBC’s website (bbc.co.uk)

Previously on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The fan-made sequel, Milliways

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Phred’s Cool Punch-Out!!

It’s a little risky to post this, because it’s a joke video game page on Tripod from 2001 that still somehow persists on the internet in 2024. I have to imagine that Phred is in his mid-to-late 40s by now. There’s several long pages here from that site, and there’s always the chance that a racist or neo-nazi joke, from an age when kids thought lightly of such things, could be lurking somewhere in there. Please understand it as a product of its time. It’s an amateurish site, but it has a lot of energy behind it.

I think it’s still worth looking at as a reminder of that age of the internet, which had many bad things about it, but also a lot of good things. I don’t know which this is. It contains a number of pretty dumb graphics hacks for Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and/or its successor released after Nintendo’s licensing deal with Tyson ran out. Those hacks can be found here, although the background (the words “Master Phred” in fancy letters) makes the descriptions and download links really hard to read. (Try highlighting the text.) If you follow a few links, you can find actual NES Punch-Out rom downloads, which it’s even more amazing to find on a website in 2024.

Among the hacked characters are a robot, Doc Louis and Zelda, sure

The characters page includes, among other hacked characters like Rick and Nick Bruiser from the SNES Punch-Out, a character named after the Wii Punch-Out opponent Disco Kid, which indicates this page has to have been updated since 2009. There’s a links page where every outgoing link, other than GameFAQs, is broken, and a secrets page where most of the secrets are fake.

Well there it is, Phred’s Cool Punch-Out. You’ve survived 23 years. May you live a hundred more.

Phred’s Cool Punch-Out!! (tripod.com)

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The Marquee and Instruction Card For Vs. Super Mario Bros.

Vs. Super Mario Bros. was the arcade version of Super Mario Bros., which made it to US arcades a few months after the NES release. It’s a much harder game than the home version, with levels brought in from the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, and operator adjustments that can make it even more difficult.

A little remarked-upon aspect of the game is that it came about before the drawn character design of Mario and his enemies had been solidified, at least in the US, so the official arcade release of SMB had a weird marquee, with an image design that was never drawn upon by later releases:

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the flyer they distributed to promote the game when it was going to be titled Mario’s Adventure:

And even more interesting, it had this title card. Behold, an official Mario looking meaner than he ever had before or has since!

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Sundry Sunday: Ending Animation for The Mystery of the Druids

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

I forget exactly where I saw it, but I observed, in pieces, a playthrough of the 2001 adventure game The Mystery of the Druids. It may have been during Awful Block at an earlier GDQ, or on some other stream. it was something. Actually, a thing. One thing. Just one.

(Amazingly, you can buy the game on Steam, and as I write this it’s like a dollar. One dollar. Just one. But the reviews indicate it has really serious bugs, so even that is probably too much.)

Besides constantly pronouncing the word druid as drood, the game’s notable for starring a police detective, Halligan, who frequently does things one might think unworthy of law enforcement. Not a great pillar of virtue, that Halligan.

The game itself doesn’t have a great ending, so someone on Youtube made their own version. It’s two minutes long, and it follows below. It is much more enjoyable than the actual game.

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Earthbound Battle Backgrounds Website

This interesting, and even slightly useful, website combines the various layers that the cult classic SNES JRPG Earthbound uses to construct its funky battle backgrounds. There are more combinations here than actually appear in the game. There is a GIF-making function, but it seems to be broken for the moment. You can still make them full-screen and save screenshots, that’s what I did, though unfortunately doing it that way means they aren’t animated.

Here are a few still examples.

Earthbound Battle Backgrounds (a bona-fide website!)

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Displaced Gamers on Mega Man 3 Glitches

A bit of scanline flickering is a fairly common problem on the NES. Even Super Mario Bros. 3 had it, and that game was made by Nintendo themselves.

Game graphics in the 8- and 16-bit ages often came down to tricky hardware manipulation. The art of doing raster effects, changing the registers in the video hardware so as to divide the screen into different sections, ultimately comes down to timing. On the Atari VCS/2600, nearly all the graphics had to be done that way, but it was still a useful technique for over a decade after that.

A lot depends on the specifics of the video chip, a custom-built piece of silicon developed for the express purpose of taking graphics defined in memory and folding it, like electronic origami, into a shape that the TV would perceive as a broadcast signal. At that time, while it might still have been possible with clever coding, CPUs weren’t nearly fast enough to do that job themselves and still produce acceptable graphic quality and run game logic. (If you want to see what it would be like, I refer readers interested in doing it the very hard way to the amazing Freespin demo, which runs on a 1541 disk drive, and no video hardware at all.)

Older NES games used a supported bit of hackery called the “Sprite 0 Hit,” a signal the PPU would send at the moment the first of the system’s 64 sprites began to be drawn. By watching for it, games could do rudimentary raster effects on a system not designed for them. The issue there was processor time: the Sprite 0 Hit feature wasn’t hooked up to an interrupt line, so the program had to continually watch for it, checking a memory location repetitively over and over until it changed. Some games spent large portions of their runtime in a tight loop checking for the Sprite 0 Hit. Since, from the program’s perspective, the signal might come at any time, the loop needed to be tight, meaning the game couldn’t spend that time doing other work or else it might be delayed in responding to the extremely time-sensitive signal.

The MMC3 mapper had a special function though that could time out when a programmable scanline was reached, and send the processor an interrupt request at that time, greatly freeing up the processor for doing other things with that time. But not all programmers understood the best way to use it, which is why Mega Man 3 has some scanline glitching in a couple of very visible places, in the pause window and on the level select screen.

Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series, which we’ve linked to multiple times in the past, has done an exposé looking into how Mega Man III’s glitches happen (28 minutes), and even wrote some code that erases all trace of them. As usual for Behind the Code, the explanation is fairly technical, especially of the fix, but the first half of it is fairly comprehensible. No one says you have to watch the whole thing. Or, indeed, any of it, but I always enjoy them!

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Computing Pi on a NES

Today’s link is to a madperson who explains how to compute digits of pi on a NES’s 6502 to an arbitrary length. As you do. Along the way it explains how to multiply and divide in binary on a processor without hardware support. It’s around nine minutes long, but if you want a machine to get to the end of pi it’ll probably take a tad bit longer.

We link to such a variety of things here. Sometimes we post light videos where someone has Kirby do funny things. Sometimes we show explainers that explain how to do arithmetic on old processors. I presume that you’ll take from these what you want, and leave the rest to the crazy people, by definition the people who are not you. I understand.

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Nintendo Direct Recap, June 2024

Well, it looks like another Nintendo Direct has come and gone. Coverage of current-day Nintendo things lies at the very edge of our tripartite purview, that of Retro, Indie and Niche, but in a way they are part of all three. Retro and Niche should be obvious; Indie, not nearly so much, but Nintendo is the least beholden of the three great console makers to the winds of trend, and even with their billions and billions of dollars they still at times manage to surface their long-held toymaker mindset. (At least, if you’re talking about game design. When it comes to throwing around their legal weight they’re the most corporate, the Disney of gaming.)

Well I’m not going to fight it. Here is my impression of every ever-lovin’ game presented in yesterday’s Nintendo Direct. Tomorrow I’ll get back to writing about random itch.io things, or Youtube videos about obscure arcade game. Those sound like something I’d do.

Here is the whole Nintendamn video, at 43 minutes loooong:

Overall: I really miss the days when Reggie Fils-Amie, Shigeru Miyamoto and, especially, Satoru Iwata would present these. Remember the time they had puppets represent everyone? Those three had chemistry. I still can’t say I approve of the reading of the narrator, who, nothing against him personally, is set at Smarm Level S.

So, the games. Titles link to the upload of just that part of the presentation on Nintendo’s Youtube account.

Mario & Luigi: Brothership. The series that bankrupted Alphadream, brought back to life. We don’t yet know if it’s a Nintendo in-house production or if another company’s making it, nor do we know if any Alphadream employees are working on it. Destructoid wonders about that too. I hope they get some credit for it, in some way.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. News of this was leaked a bit early. It looks to be of similar lineage to the NES Remix games on 3DS and WiiU. It’s weird to see Nintendo embrace speedrunning, considering that that entire community was enabled and greatly furthered by emulation, but I guess if there’s money involved corporate qualms shall be set aside.

Fairy Tale 2. I barely know what this is, and I hate to tell you this, but I don’t care about you enough to go find out. It’s okay, we can still be friends.

I know it’s based off of an anime. I find it hilarious that the first words said in the trailer are “Let’s go, Happy!” Speaking of, the slogan of Koei-Tecmo now appears to be “Level up your happiness.” I have never lost my disdain for the engrish phrase “level up.” I dislike it nearly as much as “getting a Game Over.” That how I feel, it’s because I’m right, and the Great Trash Heap has spoken. Nyaaah!

FANTASIAN Neo Dimension. “From Final Fantasy series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, and composer Nobuo Uematsu.” And from Square-Enix, natch. Maybe I’m just old (51 now) but sometimes I see a trailer for a JRPG and I just start to get a migrane. The plot has to do with restoring memories, which is like the plot of more than half of all JRPGs for the last thirty years. Someday there’ll be a JRPG plot where everyone knows who they are and is in complete control of their faculties for the entire story and it’ll be a frogdamn sensation. I haven’t even started on how it seems to be about a bunch of teenagers trying to kill God again. But I’ll say this for it: it makes unironic use of the word DIMENGEON, so I can’t hate it all that much.

Nintendo Sports SWITCH. The Switch successor to the incredibly popular Wii Sports tends to get forgotten about, but it’s still kicking… and swinging, and bowling, and now is getting a new sport in Basketball. So, now Miis can dunk. Setting all of that aside: what the hell is Spocco Square? Is it their version of (ugh) Wuhu Island?

MIO: Memories in Orbit. Nothing much to say. It seems to be an exploratory platformer where you play the part of a humanoid variation of a GLaDOS core. They don’t say anything about it in the trailer either, so I am absolved.

Disney Illusion Island update. The update is free, and it launched the day of the Direct. I also don’t know much about Illusion Island, but Mickey looks like a goofus, and I love it for that.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure. More often than you’d think, a Hello Kitty game comes out and it’s unexpectedly good, and this may be one more for that notable pile. It looks like it might be worth it for the customizable Sanrio character creator all by itself. Hello Kitty has long been the butt for a certain irascible breed of internet funnyperson. The Brunching Shuttlecocks once suggested the creation of a Sanrio fighting game called Hello Kitty, Goodbye Teeth. “She has no mouth, and she must pummel!” I’m still trying to round up enough figures to field a Hello Kitty 40K army.

I love how among this field of brainplush animals there’s the Evil Sanrio Character Kuromi, and of course, eternal malcontent BADTZ MARU, always too hip for the room. No sign of Aggretsuko tho.

Looney Tunes: Wacky World of Sports. On the other hand, I have absolutely no faith that this will even live on the same continent as good. Kids these days barely know what they missed, and probably think of Bugs Bunny as Michael Jordan’s sidekick (or even LeBron James’, because we live in hell). When me and my decrepit ilk roamed the wastes, Bugs Bunny and friends, still the best cartoons ever made and I will fight you on that, were on the air constantly. Now you have to go to MeTV Toons to find them, and you definitely should find them.

You probably should not find this game. I’m almost prepared to lay money on Bugs Bunny’s face on the box, if it gets a physical release at all, having American Kirby-Style Angry Eyes. Like Mickey and Donald got when they played Soccer, Basketball, Football, went Skateboarding and rode Motocross. (But not, strangely, when they played Golf.)

American game box art starring cartoon characters has had a long and angry history, except when golfing. Unless you’re Donald Duck, but he gets a pass as his fury, and his lack of pants, are his defining characteristics.

Anyway, so the trailer’s lead character is Lola Bunny, the one who was created for Space Jam, and that tells you nearly everything. I am prepared to admit, though, that it was good thinking to tape the tennis racket to the Road Runner’s wing. Attention to detail right there.

Among Us update. I refuse to comment.

Farmagia. Urp, another anime JRPG, every Nintendo Direct’s like half this stuff by weight. There’s so many of these games to get through and not enough to say about them. In the game’s lore the word Farmagia is the name of a profession, but it seems to be a synonym for Pokemon Trainer.

Donkey Kong Country Returns HD. Or, Donkey Kong Country Returns Returns. It’s been so long that the reboots of the reboots are being remade.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D. Ah! This looks interesting, Dragon Quest III was always the best of the early DQ titles, allowing you to actually create the characters for your party and run with a team of three Goof-Offs if you want, who cares if it makes your group insufferable and you doom the world, you do you. Instead of making it in the more recent style pioneered with Dragon Quest VIII, they’re using the Octopath Traveler engine, which looks like a great fit for it. Also announced are remakes of the first two games, in that same style, next year. It’s only a matter of time before the Famicom/NES Final Fantasy games get the same treatment, I’m sure.

The clip ends with Yuji Horii himself greeting the viewer, dopey haircut and all, and I say that with immense love. I’m happy that the same guy who designed the original Dragon Quest (and also the Portopia Serial Murder Mystery), who went to California to that early Apple II demo and saw Wizardry and Ultima there, is still helming the series after so long. I really think it shines through and makes Dragon Quest a special thing.

Richard Gariott doesn’t make Ultima games any more, since Electronic Arts keeps it and a great swath of other classic computer IP locked up. Andrew Woodhead and Robert Greenberg haven’t worked on Wizardry for decades, and Sir-Tech is long long gone. All of those missing creators is a huge shame, but Yuji Horii’s still at it, and we should all be grateful. Of course, it’s all possible because of Dragon Quest’s gigantic cultural influence in Japan. That influence is also why there’s so many anime series that adopt video game conventions without questioning them, and I can’t say I much approve of that, but I never said it was a bad thing I’m not in charge of the world.

I notice they’re still calling Loto “Erdrick” in Western territories. Dost thine other characters continue to speakest Elizabethan English also? Dost thou carest?

Funko Fusion. You know the thing about Funko Pops… they’s got dead eyes. At least these plastic monstrosities, being visual only, won’t be cluttering up the planet in a century. The whole gimmick of this game is that it’s a huge crossover of a long list of properties. Didn’t we already see that with Lego Dimensions? Are they still making movie-based Lego games?

The trailer puts a lot of focus on Freddy Fazbear’s Pop.

I’m not even halfway through the video yet! Let’s shift this recap into high gear.

Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD. Had been announced before. Multiple mansions, no Gooigi.

The New Denpa Men. The what now? Ah, was a 3DS game where you collect funky little guys with heads like the Prince of All Cosmos and have them fight in dungeons. I’m interested.

Metal Slug Attack Reloaded. Don’t get your hopes up, it’s a remake of a mobile game that only uses the aesthetics of the arcade classics. It’s got the animation of the games but tower defense gameplay. Tower defense games are not anywhere near as popular as they used to be, but I still scoff at them, scoff scoff, and I bristle when I hear someone describe my beloved Rampart as a tower defense game.

Darkest Dungeon II. I’ll be honest, I’ve never played either of the Darkest Dungeon games. You’d think I’d be all over them, like pretty on something that isn’t an ape, but no. There’s so many games that get made and nowhere enough time to play them all. I feel bad about it too. The trailer narrator tells us, with the most ominous tones they can muster through all the smarm, that your group must avert an apocalypse, but looking at the world they’re traveling through I think it might have already happened.

Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack new games. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: Four Swords: Colon Confusion. (It’s good.) Metroid Zero Mission. (It’s GREAT.) Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. (Who owns the rights to Acclaim’s output now?) And Perfect Dark. (probably a result of the deal that brought Banjo-Kazooie and Goldeneye 007 to Switch). Perfect Dark even gets online multiplayer. It’s time for a new generation of players to learn to curse the Farsight.

Phantom Brave: The Lost Hero. Nippon Ichi, so probably a lot of fun. I’m just now halfway through the video.

Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics. I am not a fan of fighting games generally. I think the fighting game boom, while it resulted in a burst of popularity for arcades, by greatly diminishing the styles of games that could be popular, ultimately resulted in their downfall. And I’ve never even played a MvC game. But I’m still kind of interested in this. Capcom’s crossover fighters are the ultimate inspiration for the Smash Bros games, after all. A lot of people will be pleased to see this. Among all those fighting games, sticking out like a sore gun, is The Punisher, a lone belt brawler.

Super Mario Party Jamboree. I guess they’ve abandoned the numbering system for good. It was getting silly after 10 numbered games. I wonder who makes these now that Konami owns Hudson Soft. It features online play for up to 20 players at once! With 110 minigames, it looks like ZoomZike‘s gonna have his luck cut out for him on this one.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. THIS is the one the internet’s been abuzz about, even making it over to my other internet home at Metafilter. Why? Because ZELDA’S FINALLY PLAYABLE BABY! Not as an animate statue or in a romhack or in a weird CD-i game but as the genuine bonafide protagonist in a Nintendo-made title! What is more, it’s not a game in the Breath of the Wild style, a gigantic non-linear exploratory monsterpiece. It seems to signify that Nintendo thinks there’s room for both styles in new games. And it’s also made with the HD Link’s Awakening engine, which looked great! Even the gameplay looks really interesting. Zelda isn’t a traditional sword-wielder, but instead has a magic wand that can duplicate lots of different things, including enemies that will fight for her. I think people were hoping for a warrior Zelda, but I appreciate that they didn’t want to just make her Link but with breasts. (Isn’t that Linkle is supposed to be, anyway?)

There was also announced a new Switch system design to celebrate the game. As DoctorFedora on MeFi said, it seems odd to announce a new design when the Switch’s successor is supposed to come out only next year, but Zelda merch tends to be evergreen anyway.

Just Dance 2025. While I’m still sad that they aren’t still making Wii versions of Just Dance. The last Wii version was made in 2020; the line for WiiU didn’t even make it past 2019. The first Just Dance was a Wii game made in 2009, meaning there’s eleven Wii versions of Just Dance, released over that many years. They stopped making the Wii in 2013! But besides that, I don’t have a whole lot else to say about Just Dance.

LEGO Horizon Adventures. Before, they’d make Lego games that crossed over with movies; now, they make them crossing over with other games. You could always count on Lego to provide a cheeky irreverent take on whatever property they crossed with. While the gameplay is usually simple and kid-friendly, there were a lot of jokes for the adults playing along with them to get. I don’t know if that continues with the newer games, but I really hope it does.

Stray. Ah, the kittycat game. Everyone knows about this one, even me, although my tastes run more towards Little Kitty Big City. (A Q&A with its makers that I did should be up on Game Developer before long! Another fun cat game I did a Q&A about is Gato Roboto!) Even after the end of humankind, cats will still be knocking things off of shelves, and I’m certain that cats will outlive us. I’m not sure about dogs though.

Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings™ Game. This The Lord of the Rings™ game promise to be the enjoyable! Let us the all obtain the game when the it come out! Shall provide many time of the joy! Switch fun to have the entertainment when the play on TV occur! What the happy shall be!

How did that title even happen? And of course Nintendo’s promotional materials will all faithfully copy that extraneous The, because The Title of the Property is The Lord of The Rings™, and it MUST BE OBEYED, or else face the wrath of Melkor who is Morgoth.

I’d be done with this recap by now if I didn’t keep embarking on these cockamamie digressions, but they’re too fun to pass up. Trailer observations the now!

Everyone remembers the perfectly round doors that Hobbit dwellings have. But how many renditions of Middle Earth remember the doorknob in the center of the door? And how many remember that Bilbo’s ancestor Bullroarer invented golf, the sport with the power to quell even Mickey Mouse’s rage?

The promise of the trailer is that the game will let people experience life as a Hobbit. Was there ever a great demand for that? Most Hobbits, like Bilbo’s cousins the Sackville-Bagginses, were pretty insular and conservative. They’d probably have voted Tory. Bilbo and Frodo were exceptions, because of the fairy blood in their lineage from Bullroarer’s wife. Yes it’s true, I know Middle Earth lore, but, ah-ha, I never pretended to be cool! Bright blue my jacket is, and my boots are yellow!

Continuing the trailer, wow they’re really into this Hobbit home life thing. It’s essentially Halfling Crossing. No adventures at all. Nasty things, they make you late for dinner! The last shot of the game has Gandalf in it, so I guess the Wider World does factor in slightly, but it still doesn’t look like you get to do any burgling.

Ace Attorney Investigations Collection. The trailer itself notes that one of the two games in this package was never localized. I wonder if anyone’s gotten a distorted view of the legal profession from the Ace Attorney games? Phoenix Wright and his cohort spend a lot of time tracking down clues themselves, instead of brainstorming ways to restrict what young people do, which the media tells me is the common objective of all lawyers.

The Ace Attorney series is beloved by a lot of people. Like me, I am part of that lot. I still remember fondly the time when Phoenix called a parrot to the witness stand. Even sidekick Maya Fey, the girl who claimed to have two stomachs, was a bit worried about that one. That moment isn’t one from these games, but I’m sure there’ll be plenty of other instances. And these games star Miles Edgeworth, fan favorite yet also the most stuck-up person theoretically possible to exist. I want to see him call a parrot to the witness stand. Make it happen Capcom!

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. The trailer opens with two anime highschoolers walking together. The boy has weird colored eyes, like many anime protagonists. The girl has an incredibly short skirt, like many anime girls. It’s gotta be a JRPG.

Then the screen flips to a flaming hellscape! Caused by oddly cute and colorful monsters! I knew it, it was only a matter of time: the Pokemon are fed up and taking over.

The narrator then tells us how Takumi Sumino’s life got turned upside-down. He’d like us to take a minute, to just sit right there, and listen to how he became the prince of a place called Bel-Air.

“A mysterious school mascot suddenly appears.”

…

I am having to fight the strong urge to just close the browser window now. I have to note that this trailer is being played straight. It sounds like the silliest thing on Planet Earth, but the cutscene doesn’t realize it.

As the trailer continues with its story about cute blob monsters attacking a school that the protag must enroll in, it becomes clear this game is

a high school-based time management sim like Persona, and probably also a dating sim,
that has grid-based tactical combat, and
has permadeath. Choice quote, spoken by a student in the game: “That was the first time I ever saw a person die….”

It’s like they found a second solution to the anti-life equations that led to Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE.

I am somewhat joking here. Why? Because it’s easy. I could probably rewrite this whole recap and the jokes would be completely different. But all of these crazy ideas kind of make me want to see how they all fit together. We need more crazy ideas in gamedev, and these developers are clearly smoking the good shit. But, I still don’t think this one is for me.

“The creators of Danganronpa present…” Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah now it all makes sense. Or as I should say, it doesn’t make sense, but in a really familiar way. It’s from Spike-Chunsoft. Listen, anything that helps this deeply weird company survive long enough to make more Shiren games is okay by me. So I approve of this… provisionally.

Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge of the Seven. Another JRPG, as I told you every Nintendo Direct has several of them. I think of how the Dreamcast had only like three.

The SaGa games are all bonkers, but they’re my kind of bonkers. This is a full remake of the Super Famicom Romancing SaGa 2, and not the Octopath Traveler kind of reimagining, this one’s been turned into a very different-looking game without pixel-art trappings. I may have to look into this one.

…and finally, after 41 minutes of video and four hours of writing…

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.

We find out very little about the game from the trailer, it’s really just a teaser, but it’s glorious. It does leave me wondering though: after all this time and so many games, why are Samus’ main antagonists throughout still called just “space pirates?” They don’t even get a proper noun! None of them except Ridley has even a name. (He counts as one of them, right?)

Done! See you next the time!

rodneylives