Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s a maxim among D&D players that the deadliest thing the DM has in his arsenal against players is the lowly pool, stream, river, pond, lake or ocean. (Zee Bashew has an entertaining 3-minute video about this.) There’s just so many ways to kill a PC involving water.
Well, this isn’t just a Dungeons & Dragons thing. Sierra On-Line adventure games had many excuses to off a wannabe hero for just thinking about approaching a body of fluid, as Sierra Art’s 4 1/2-minute compilation video demonstrates. Whether it’s drowning in it, being swept down current by it, creatures living in it, or it actually being deadly acid: if it’s liquid, it’s fatal.
That’s not the only adventure game in which the wet stuff will kill you. Famously, the only way to actually die in The Secret of Monkey Island is to hang around too long under water. If you wait for ten minutes down there, Guybrush Threepwood will actually drown, which replaces the action verbs with Bloat, Stare, Bob, Rot and Order Hint Book. (2 minute video)
You can drown in Return to Money Island too (2 1/2 minutes), which is funny because the game is presented as Guybrush telling of his adventure in discovering the secret of Monkey Island to his son, wrecking the whole premise.
I know, lots of posts on this blog end up being about Nintendo in one way or other, but their corporate stance of toymakers, regardless of its truth, means they often do interesting things, and one category of those things is having special animations when you delete save files. But deleting save files is destructive, obviously, so many people never see them. Here’s a video compilation of some of them. Of particular note is the deletion process of Animal Crossing games (yes, them again!), and of all of those there’s the one for the original Gamecube version, which pretty much implies you’re killing your village’s inhabitants. A pretty heavy trip to lay on a kid! Here’s that video, from Nintendo Unity (9 minutes):
There’s been rather a lot of interesting Animal Crossing items to share lately, many of them from the Youtube account of Hunter R, who specializes in AC. He presents the video in today’s find, which is about an interesting relic from Nintendo’s Gamecube era: the e-Reader.
The e-Reader uses a variation of the technology used in QR codes. QR codes, surprisingly date back as far as 1994. Old-time internet layabouts like myself remember the CueCat, a special barcode scanner that was given out for free, under the assumption that they could make money off of them from advertisers using their tech to encode URLs to their sites in their print ads, then users could scan them with their CueCats to jump immediately to their sites. Yes, this was a business model that people once thought could work. Maybe it could have at one point: that’s the major use case for QR codes now.
The e-Reader was rather different. A Gameboy Advance peripheral released in Japan in 2001, and the US in 2002, it could scan tiny dot patterns printed on playing card size pieces of cardboard. Whereas QR codes are intended for small amounts of data like URLs, a single e-Reader card could hold 2,112 bytes of data. The hardware itself had a ROM built-in that contained an NES emulator, so one of the things that could be distributed, on small decks cards, were smaller NES games like the black box series. I had an e-Reader myself back then, and while it’s long since misplaced and probably lost for good, I still have an officially-released pack of cards somewhere with Balloon Fight on it, and also the weird e-Reader variant of Mario Party, which I think I’ve only ever had the chance to play once.
The e-Reader was one of Nintendo’s shorter-lived play experiments, and didn’t last long. But one of the most interesting releases for it was a large sequence of Animal Crossing cards. There were hundreds of these cards, and they were kind of like an early version of the current-day Animal Crossing amiibo cards. It’s amazing there were so many, because the hardware requirements were significant: you needed a Gamecube and GC Animal Crossing disk, of course, and the e-Reader, and a Gameboy Advance, and a GBA/GC link cable. And the cards themselves, of course.
The cards could be used to get all kinds of items in your Animal Crossing village, depending on the card. The amazing thing about the cards is that they seem like they’d be the kind of thing that would have been quickly cracked and turned into a way to obtain arbitrary objects, like the never-released Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda NES items in Animal Crossing, but were in fact only broken fairly recently.
The 11-minute video linked here explains how they worked and how they were cracked, and also links to a GitHub repository with program that can be used to generate your own cards. But Hunter R. has been on this beat for a while, and has two other videos on the subject you can peruse if you wish, on generating custom villagers with cards (12 minutes), and generating Super Mario and Zelda NES items (18 minutes). The villager one is interesting because you can make arbitrary villagers with it, with appearances and names not among the ones included on the disk, although only using the Japanese version of the e-Reader. Even you don’t have the magic combination of gadgets to make practical use of them, they’re interesting watches to understand how the e-Reader worked, and how it was, eventually, exploited.
Argh! This video from Press A! on Youtube promises big by promising to explain how speedrunners blast through the over 5 1/2 million Bells needed to fully upgrade their (pre-2.0) house in Animal Crossing New Horizons, but then in typical game Youtuber fashion they explain nearly everything else about the game, the debt, and all the other things speedrunners must do along the way! Here is the 12-minute video, but I’ll give you the gist below:
First: the glitch only works on version 1.2.1 or earlier, so nowadays it requires hacks to downgrade your Switch to do them. And the trick also means having at least two users on the same Switch, both with residents on the island.
The trick involves duplicating items, then selling the duplicates. The items are duplicated by putting an item that can have other objects put on top of it, like tables or the cardboard boxes in the Recycle Bin, down near the border of the town square area.
First, an expensive item is put on the table or box. The Switch promo item given to the first player upon starting the game is typically used by runners. Both players are brought in, then the second player spins the box while the first player picks the item up off of the box. If done on the same frame, Player One will pick up the item, but Player Two’s rotating of the box will mean it also remains on the box. Now there’s two copies of the item. This process can be repeated immediately, filling up Player One’s inventory with the item. They then sell the items for profit, and continue.
I miss the days when you could just find this out from a text file on GameFAQs, but then tricks like that are a lot harder to discover randomly these days without something like Youtube’s discovery algorithm to uncover them, although it too is random and scattershot, or else following a ton of Discords to seek out all of the little gaming communities where all this data is hoarded.
So that is how they do it, but since it’s specifically on an old version of the game that you can’t even play anymore it’s of limited use to normal players. New Horizons changed so much in that first year that this information is largely of use as a curiosity unless you’re involved in the frankly bizarre speedrunning community.
My own trick for paying off your house means breeding expensive roses, ideally blue but black will do, then growing tons of them in the fields of your island and selling them. If you have the DIY recipes to make wreathes or crown from them, then it doubles their sale price. It won’t pay off your house of in under two hours, but if you can get your starter roses from elsewhere, you can pay it off much faster that way, maybe in a couple of months. I’ve explained the details of that process before, and in multiple places, but hey at least I didn’t just post it in a Discord where non-obsessives will never see it.
There, that’s my annoyed internet oldbie rant for today. Come back tomorrow where I’ll shake my fist at something else, probably AI slop. Ta!
Found by long-term MeFite Going To Maine, DOOM: The Gallery Experience is a DOOM mod that changes out all of its various elements for museum equivalents. Ammo becomes drinks from among Wine, Beer, Gin or “Watr”; Health has become Cash (which you can spend in the gift shop) and Armor becomes Cheese. (You still pick them up like powerups, though.) And there’s still secret passages to find. The map is generally the same as that as the first level from the shareware game, although the demons have been moved out and replaced with objets d’art, all of which can be examined for information on the work.
RollingCutter over on Youtube has compiled two videos, so far, of unusual and unexpected facts about classic Mega Man titles. First I link the videos (here’s the first, and the second), then some of the more interesting facts from them:
#1 (10 minutes)
#2 (15 minutes)
So, some (but by no means all) of the interesting facts they revealed:
In Mega Man 2, most of the Robot Masters get healed if you use their own weapons against them (with the exception of Metal Man, who dies in two hits to his weapon).
With the exception of Mega Man 3, the paths drawn on the map screen between levels of the multi-part Dr. Wily stages roughly match the routes you take through them.
In Mega Man 10, there are three boss fight rooms between drone enemies that match the weapons and behavior of past bosses from throughout the series. The lit boxes in the background of the fight generally correspond to the numbers of those bosses. For example, the drone that matches the behavior of Elecman, DLN #8, lights up the 8th of those background tiles, counting left-to-right from the top of the screen. Watch the first video for details.
Mega Man 6 has two instances (one described in each video) where two elements in a stage are linked. In Flame Man’s stage there are oil pools that light up and become deadly if struck by fire from enemies. But one pool late in the level is sometimes already on fire when you reach it. It’s because its state matches that of another oil pool earlier in the level: if that oil pool gets set aflame, then it’ll be on fire too. And in one of the Mr X stages later on, there are balance platforms in the level that match the state you left the same kind of platforms in in the room before.
In Mega Man 7, the cloud platforms can be frozen or electrified by your weapons. If electrified, they’ll do damage to you for a short time.
Hitting Heat Man with the Crash Bomber (MM2) heals him and speeds him up. Hitting Spring Man with thunderbolts repeatedly eventually causes him to glitch out and make the level impossible to finish. (You have to use around three full weapon tanks of energy to do it.)
In Mega Man 3, you usually can’t pause the game while a weapon’s bullets are onscreen, either your default Mega Buster’s shots or those of a special weapon, but they didn’t implement this check when firing shots when Rush is onscreen. If while Rush is onscreen you fire shots, then switch to another weapon, the Buster’s shots will have the properties of the weapon you switched to. In certain places (depicted in the second video) this makes certain enemies must easier to defeat.
In the Copy Mega Man fight in MM3, where there’s one true boss and two fakes, the first time they appear the top one is always the real one; when the bosses teleport out and back in, the real one always appears one frame before the others.
In Mega Man 2, if you pause the game while Wood Man’s in the middle of a jump, the boss will immediately jump again in mid-air.
In my opinion the highlights of the series so far. Mega Man 3 has debug features left enabled in the game, that can be operated using the second controller. This is the reason for the generally-known trick (from Nintendo Power) where you can make Mega Man jump super high, even in the air, using the second controller. And in Mega Man 1, if you’re very high up on the screen in a specific place in Ice Man’s stage (above the score), and jump and quickly move back and forth at the top of your jump, the game can glitch out in surprising ways. The second video has several examples, such as the game resetting or crashing, messing up the palette or graphics, or even immediately starting the Yellow Devil boss fight with incorrect graphics.
There are certain bosses throughout the series where it’s possible to land a hit on them while their energy bars are filling at the start of the fight. In some cases this results in weird behavior, but in Mega Man 7, you can destroy Spring Man and Turbo Man before the fight starts this way. (Cloud Man can also be damaged this way, but it might cause the game to glitch out.)
As it turns out, as explained by the below video (here’s a direct link, 10 minutes long), the NES and SNES have very similar control setups. Both controller ports have seven lines, and both read them using a shift register that can be used to read arbitrary numbers of buttons. The SNES basically just has more buttons to read.
Due to this, there’s homebrew NES software that’s made to use the SNES mouse, and even emulators that will convert your PC’s mouse into simulated SNES mouse signals, which will be fed into the emulated NES and the software running thereon. (It isn’t all buttons, but it sends the displacement as a binary number.)
The video comes to us from the account of CutterCross, who’s making CrossPaint, an NES art program that uses the SNES mouse. A demo can be gotten from itch.io.
Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven games are still a bit obscure, but have a passionate fanbase. They share design sensibilities with the WarioWare series, which is because both share a character designer, Ko Takeuchi. They both have a distinctive clean-line look, and a similar sense of humor.
About four years ago, some of those fans made one of those reanimation compilations of the series, and the fruits of their labor is unusually keeping in spirit of the original, which itself samples many different art and musical styles. The reanimation feels like it could have been one of the remixes from the games itself.
Speaking of, the reanimation covers all of the remixes, of all of the games in the series, with the result that the full sequence is eighteen minutes long! It’s quite faithful to the originals, despite the vastly different animation styles, and it even scored an appreciative comment from Takeuchi himself! Here it is, but be warned: you’ll watch it for a while, then see one of the videos mention it’s only half over, and you’ll think to yourself, no way:
An aside, a different reanimation project near to my heart, but unrelated to video games, is the highly-memeable 2004 collaboration that animated They Might Be Giants’ Fingertips (6 minutes, original page). Note, in its original Flash incarnation, different elements would be selected on every play, an aspect that is unfortunately lost in these renderings.
The original Legend of Zelda, unique in the series, not only has keys that can be used in any dungeon, but you can even buy keys, for considerable expense, in shops, for either 80 or 100 rupees.
But, is the purchase of keys ever necessary? Usually Zelda 1 gives you many more keys than you need. Even in the Second Quest, which tightens the screws, you can usually get by if you just make sure to clear every room and bomb some walls.
But consider the worst-case scenario. What if you open just the wrong doors? Is it possible, if you waste keys on rooms that aren’t on the critical path to completing the game, to make it so you have to resort to buying keys in shops?
In an 11-minute video, “TheRetroDude,” as he styles himself, examines this question. tl;dw: not in the First Quest, but it’s technically possible to soft-lock yourself, unless you resort to commercially-provided keys, in the Second Quest, if you’re very injudicious about the doors you open. Here:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Who, among everyone on the internet, is just finding out about the release of Episode 4 of the breakout Youtube hit The Amazing Digital Circus here? It’s already up to 44 million views.
I’ll embed it here, but before we get to that it’s worth noting how it got to this place. Its creator Gooseworx made a number of items before it, including one linked to directly from these halls, Little Runmo. A few other representative Worx from the Goose are The Darly Boxman Show, The Ghost of the Year Award and Elain the Bounty Hunter.
Not too long ago Gooseworx joined up with Glitch Productions, a small outfit that hither-then had been known mostly for machinima based on Super Mario 64. Soon after they released the extremely popular show Murder Drones, but it was tADC that really caused them to blow up.
Now, tADC is released on Netflix around the same time it debuts on Youtube. I hope they didn’t have to sign some kind of demonic contract to do that; some folk have been treated badly by the Netflix regime. But the show is still on Youtube and can be watched there, if you can put up with their horrendous advertising scheme, that is.
Several characters show heretofore unseen sides of their personalities in this one. Up until now Gangle has only been a bit character; usually-helpful Ragatha spends most of the episode in a Stupid Sauce stupor; and Jax, under the prospect of punishment, doesn’t get to be nearly as entertainingly belligerent as in the past. It also sees the return of Gummigoo, but is it really the same person as Pomni remembers?
Gooseworx has a Tumblr, which is full of hints about the show and the direction it may take. One piece of information revealed there is that The Amazing Digital Circus is planned to be a limited series, with a total of nine episodes, although with some possible short detours along the way. The show has turned out to be popular in Japan, and there’s a manga adaptation of it being web-published. I’ll leave it to you to find links to that (there’s fan translations out there too), but one fun page from it, from the issue-end artist created content, is this festive/creepy Abstracted Kaufmo christmas tree!
Ms. Pac-Man. Currently on the outs with Pac-Man rights-owner Bandai-Namco because its origins weren’t with them, and its developer GCC licensed the rights to another party than them, which has given us such travesties as “Pac-Mom.” Which is a shame, because in general Ms. Pac-Man is a better game than Pac-Man. Its four mazes don’t have the nuance that Pac-Man’s does (there’s no one-way routes, for instance), it doesn’t have scatter periods to give the player a breather during each board, and after board #7 its fruit, and the score award for chasing it down, is random, taking an important measure of skill and just throwing it up in the air and shrugging.
But it does have multiple mazes. And its Red and Pink ghosts behave randomly for the first bit of each board (here’s a prior post about that), eliminating the major design flaw of Pac-Man: its vulnerability to patterns. Pac-Man is certainly not the only game to lack substantive randomness, but the nature of its maze-based play is that it’s relatively easy to perform them. So long as you hold in the direction you need to go at least five frames before you reach an intersection, you can be sure that you’re performing a pattern perfectly, making Pac-Man into an endurance game more than anything. Ms. Pac-Man doesn’t have that problem.
But that doesn’t mean that Ms. Pac-Man can’t be mastered, and the basis of that is through a technique called grouping. Grouping can be done in Pac-Man too, but if you know some good patterns it isn’t necessary. But in Ms. Pac-Man it’s a key skill, both to make sure you eat as many ghosts as possible in the early and mid boards, and for general survival, for a bunch of ghosts in one lump is much easier to avoid than a scattered mess of four separate ghosts.
The basic idea is to understand the ways to move in the maze so that pursuing ghosts take slightly different routes to reach you, so that leading ghosts are delayed just a bit, or trailing ghosts approach you slightly faster.
This time I’m going to leave the explanation to the video, but it’s interesting to think about, and to see if you can apply this information yourself.
In Mario Party games, the most dreaded spaces tend to be the Bowser Spaces, where the King of the Koopa himself intervenes to ruin your, or even all the players, day(s). It’s pretty consistent overall: prepare to lose a number of coins, or even one of your Stars, those game-winning MacGuffins.
But what you might not know is that, usually, if you land on one of his spaces and you don’t have any coins or Stars, Bowser usually gives you a small number of coins instead! It’s one of the series’ many catch-up mechanisms, designed to keep trailing players in the game.
In this video (9 minutes), Nintendo Unity shows us the result of a destitute player landing on a Bowser space throughout many of the games in the series. You see? He’s not so bad after all! Now if we could only do something about his kidnapping habit, it’s hard to put a friendly face on that one.
