The Flipside of Gaming
Will we ever run out of weirdly obsessive video game details to learn? I can’t rightly say, but for today at least there is a video from Bobby Bionic’s investigation into weird behavior by the signs at the end of Sonic the Hedgehog levels. (16 minutes)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Mashed has a fun animation up on Youtube starring Sonic, his pals, and his enemies, where they’ve been, um, ensmallerd to itty bitty size. It’s a standard Saturday Morning kind of plot, but the voices are good, the writing is funny, and the animation, by Painter Seap, is sharp. It’s 5 1/2 minutes long, and it’s embedded below. Just so you’re properly warned, it ends on a cliffhanger, but it’s a fairly minor one.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
From Newgrounds, that hotbed of gaming stuff for twenty-eight years now, which suggests to me that it might be better called Oldgrounds by now, but that is not here, there, nor anywhere. This video, from user PoultrygeistGame (I have not checked if that is on their driver’s license, if they have one), is about Sonic the Hedgehog fandom, and how difficult it is to properly deduce the general opinion of that fandom of its series just from the content. Here is the video, for which I have to try using a new form of embed in order to present here, since Newgrounds embedding isn’t as automated as is with the Tube of You. Note: contains profanity, if that is of concern. Also alludes to certain unhealthy aspects of online culture. You’ll see.
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
The gaming world is abuzz about speedruns. Speedruns are what gaming since at least Sonic CD call “time attacks,” attempts to play a game while minimizing the completion time. The phrase is a somewhat awkward borrowing from Japanese, as are a number of other gaming terms, like “stage clear” or “level up,” that happened when their gaming culture began to seep out overseas with the popularity of Japanese consoles and games from the time of the NES and SNES. (I am not certain, but I wouldn’t be surprised that the earliest English use of “level up” was in a Final Fantasy game.)
But that’s a digression. Sorry, I tend to make them a lot. Let’s go back to time attacks. Another version of the idea is a score attack, a play of a game with the intent to get a high score. For a lot of the arcade era, score attacks were just how you played video games, and there didn’t need to be a special term for them.
Score in games has become much less important over the years, but it still persists in places. Super Mario Bros. is a notable early game that still has score, but devalues it. If you find a repeatable extra life (like from using a turtle shell to defeat a lot of enemies), you can mint points, that is to say, earn scores that are arbitrarily high, by getting the life and all the points up to it on a level, dying on purpose, then repeating those actions on the next and successive lives.
It took a long time but that was the beginning of the death knell for the importance of score in games. It didn’t help that, while score is important in a way in Super Mario Bros., since it’s a frequent award and needed as a spacer before the game starts awarding extra lives, it’s used for nothing else. Super Mario games will grant extra lives at the drop of Mario’s ubiquitous hat, but they won’t give you any just for earning points.
One game that does earn you extra lives for scoring points, interestingly, is Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Not the first Sonic game, which takes more of a Super Mario approach, but both Sonic 2, and all the versions of Sonic 3, give you an extra life for every 50,000 points you earn. They also copy Mario’s gimmick of scoring more points if you can defeat enemies without landing from a jump, or destroying blocks. Although unlike Mario’s progression of something like 100, 200, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, it’s more like 100, 200, 500, then 1,000 a few times, then suddenly 10,000.
Both series are keen to give you all these points, but other than Sonic’s extra lives, they aren’t good for much. Super Mario Bros. 3 gives you a card-matching minigame for every 80,000 points you collect, and sometimes other rewards if you match score digits with each other. Sonic was content to have extra lives be the main reward for high scores, even if the rest of the game gives you plenty of extra lives anyway. More recent games seem to be phasing out even the notion of a life counter, which has given them rather a dearth of things to reward players with.
Well, my plea to gamedevs of the current age is to reconsider score! It’s not a bad measure of player skill, if you design it carefully! It’s easy, if you’re careless, to allow the player to create score loops, which make a mockery of scoreboards, but it gives players something to shoot for other than just game completion.
Score can make for an interesting alternative to plain old time attacks, since it lets the designer create alternative rewards for skillful play. That is why I find score attack romhacks to be interesting, especially when they provide a purpose for score beyond just an increasing number.
The focus of this post is a score attack mod for Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Even though it uses score to award extra lives, this hack rips that out, and instead makes the player’s score into a life meter of a sort. You start out with 5,000 points, but rapidly lose points. In addition to the normal kinds of in-level scoring, you get 50 points for every ring you collect, 1,000 for crossing a checkpoint (which otherwise don’t work) and 2,000 points for each extra life found in a level. When you get hit you lose some points, but can earn some of them back by collecting the rings that spill out. On the other hand, you don’t get the score awards you would normally get for finishing a level, so no 50,000-point time bonus if you can finish Emerald Hill Zone 1 in less than 30 seconds. The Special Stages have also been disabled, so those can’t be used to milk bonus points either. The score countdown stops when you don’t have control over Sonic, when you’re invincible, and when you each the end of a level (passing the goal sign or beating a boss).
There are no lives really; if your character dies, you restart the level with the score you had when it began, mine 5,000 points. That takes care of score loops, since you don’t carry over any points you earned before dying. That makes the game a bit hard for casual play, a frequent issue with romhacks, but an interesting challenge for Sonic 2 experts.
The hack is playable under a number of rules, and with either Sonic, Tails or Knuckles, with each character’s signature moves and abilities. The drop dash from Sonic Mania is even enabled by default. And SRAM support has been hacked in, in order to save your best scores.
It’s an interesting modification to the game to support a different style of playing. If you enjoy the classic Sonic games, you might want to give it a shot!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
A while back we posted Community, But Sonic, a fun little Youtoon from frequent Sundry Sunday appearator Pringus McDingus, of Sonic characters animated to audio from Community.
Along those same lines, here’s an animated storyboard of Sonic characters aniedited to fit Brooklyn Nine-Nine audio, from Doig & Swift. (Words in italics may not have actuality.)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I’ll admit it, there’s this cable that goes into my brain directly from Youtube, and I use it to cut the number of game-related things I have to post daily on this site by a full seventh. I know you all suspected it, I’m just confirmin’ it. I’m like a vermin, for confirmin’. I’m a squirmin’ vermin for confirmin’! In German! No, no let’s not write Shecks my language skills cannot kassieren.
Record scratch you know who does fun cartoons sometimes? Doobus Goobus. Like that other person, Pringus McDingus. I’d understand if you mixed them up from their names. But DooGoo posts more often, and longer things! Just a little less polished. Pringus has a really appealing art style, while Doobus traffics in the internet’s default art style: purposefully ugly. Nothing against that as a style, just calling a misshappen spade that thing that it is.
The requisite preamble now complete, please enjoy five Sonic the Hedgehog characters using profanity at each other in an entertaining manner.
The Chaotix Neighbors (& Knuckles) (Youtube, 1 1/2 minutes)
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)
On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.
The world of romhacks ranges far and wide, from dumb graphics hacks that put Wilford Brimley in place of Mario to full games that are unrecognizable from the software they were made from. We usually try to focus on more substantive fare, but today we present three hacks that mostly leave Mario 64 unchanged, except for giving the overall-wearing movie star a rest in favor of one of three understudies.
In the case of Super Cream 64, it feels like there’s enough to go by despite the core game, in most senses, being the same as Super Mario 64.
Saying that it’s a simple character swap is both dead accurate and wildly understating the effort that went into this. Nearly all the characters have new models, and there’s a few more in there as well. Mario has been replaced with Cream the Rabbit from (a couple of) the Sonic the Hedgehog games. Cream’s one of those characters that barely got any main game appearances before being relegated to the likes of guest roles in kart racers, so unless you’re as soaked in the deep Sonic lore, as I appear to be, you might never have heard of her, or Cheese, a Chao that follows her around (don’t ask me what a Chao is, I could tell you but the answer would probably not be useful to you) her mother Vanilla, or her friend Blaze the Cat, who are also in this hack. You may know of Amy Rose, who’s also here.
There are some play differences. Somehow Cream can fly, kind of, in a gliding sort of way, which makes the game a little bit easier. A small number of areas have been changed. But mostly this is a game for people who haven’t gotten their fill of Super Mario 64 already, and who want to play it as a different character. It’s almost as light and fluffy as its protagonist, but it’s evident that a lot of care has gone into it.
Here’s a bit of gameplay to show you what it’s about:
Super Cream 64 came to my attention when a friend was putting together a console-playable copy of it for her Sonic-obsessed kid. It’s amiable and mostly harmless. I can’t say it’s my usual kind of thing (the game itself really is mostly Mario 64, and Cream is a little too cutesy for me), but maybe it’s more to the taste of some of you out there?
This post started out being just about SC64, but here’s a couple of other character replacements that may be amusing, for a few minutes at least.
Excepting his appearances in Super Smash Bros. games, Captain Falcon is rarely playable on foot. Captain Falcon 64 suggests a run style and moveset that’s pretty much how one would imagine he’d play in an officially-made 3D platformer.
The logical intersection between Cream 64 and Falcon 64 would, of course, be Sonic 64. He’s even faster, and harder to control, than Captain Falcon. There are some gameplay changes here, including the ability to become Super Sonic, but I couldn’t tell you how. Maybe explore it yourself and see if you can figure it out.
Super Cream 64, by Gamebun (Sonic Fan Game HQ)
Captain Falcon 64, by PastaPower and Blakeoramo (SMW Central)
Super Mario 64: Sonic Edition, by Thodds (SMW Central)
Pringus McDingus brings us another well-animated bit, this time with Sonic characters instead of the usual Mario characters, animated to sound clips from Community. It’s fun!
Youtuber T2norway educates us on a very commonly used font for Nintendo products from around the Gamecube era onward, especially remembered for its use in Wii Sports and other Wii software:
The video’s only four minutes long but the basic gist is that it’s actually two closely-related fonts, New Rodin and Shin Go, both based on a typeface created in 1975 called Gona. They have been called the Japanese version of Helvetica. They see frequent use in Japan in media, on signage, and of course in games too!
What’s the deal with this font? (Youtube, T2norway, 4 minutes)
The Sega Saturn was one of the first consoles to feature a built-in real-time clock. Most systems now have one, so I’m kind of surprised that very few games make use of it. Animal Crossing does, sure, and some Pokemon titles have time-of-day features (which they had to include their own clocks in the cartridge hardware to support), but few other games bother reading the date.
One prominent example of a game that did was the Christmas demo version of Nights Into Dreams. Ordinarily just a single-level of the full game, the disk had a number of special modes that would crop up at different times. December was one of them, which triggered Christmas Nights mode, with special cutscenes and graphics. But it also had special events for playing during November or January (“Winter Nights”), New Year’s Day, and April Fools’ Day. Especially notable was an unlockable mode that allowed playing as Sonic the Hedgehog, in what is his first true 3D outing!
This video shows off all of Christmas Nights Into Dreams’ special modes, and you don’t have to fiddle with your computer’s clock to see them!
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Lego is banning new Ideas projects based on The Legend of Zelda, according to Chris Wharfe at Brick Fanatics. The reasoning given is a bit vague. It could either be because Lego is working on their own Zelda sets (and they already have a working relationship with Nintendo, making the popular Super Mario sets), or it could be that the rights to Zelda models were sold to someone else. Either way, it may mean we get Zelda models through some company eventually.
PC Gamer, Andy Chalk: Final Fantasy XVI’s using excuses to not have Black characters. Specifically, by claiming the game’s world is based on medieval Europe, despite Black people existing there. Grumble, grumble!
Old school blogger Mark Frauenfelder of good ol’ Boing Boing mentions illustrator Hollie Mengert discovered her work was used without her permission to make AI-generated work, and the model that utilized her work released as open source by MysteryInc152. It links to an original article by Andy Baio at Waxy. Someone explain to me how AI-generated work isn’t legally a derivative work based on every work it’s trained on? That seems like it’s just obvious.
Rich Stanton at PC Gamer writes that EA’s been granted a patent on game controls that change based on how well the player does. Software patents are bad on principle, that is a horse that I will always flog despite this awful situation having existed for literally decades now, but getting past that, for now. This seems at first like just another version of adaptive difficulty, which is also something that seems like it’s kind of a problem when it happens without notifying the player or giving them a say in it. I know I know, “Kent Drebnar, get with the 21st Century.” Maybe I’ve been hanging out with the Gripe Monster too much lately. The article goes back into the history of these kinds of effort, going all the way back to Compile’s Zanac, although I would argue that’s not so much adaptive difficulty as a system that the player can strategize to manipulate. Zanac is terrific, by the way.
Bryan at Nintendo Everything mentions that Sega is hiring a Sonic “loremaster,” presumably someone who knows the history of the many forms of the character. Said role will assist in creating new content and characters in the Sonic universe. Sounds like a tall order given the many varied and contradictory versions of the property there’s been, but I’m sure there are people out there who are up to it. Good luck, whoever they pick!