Let’s break down the title. “AsumSaus” is one of the best Youtubers on the subject of Super Smash Bros. Melee. He makes well-edited, entertaining videos that don’t go overboard. Overboard is hear defined as employing obnoxious editing and a speaking style that would make a morning zoo radio host say, “hey, maybe you should dial it back a little.”
AsumSaus is great, and his most popular video, which we posted here back in 2023, tells an engaging story well, about the success of aMSa, the Melee player who won championships using Yoshi, a character nearly everyone else in that scene looks down upon. Hey, if you missed that video you should go watch it now (54m). It’s enough to almost make people who (gasp!) don’t care about goofy tournament platform fighters take interest.
This video isn’t about that. In fact, I’ve been trying to not post so many Youtube videos here lately. This is the first one I’ve posted since Sundry Sunday! See, I’m trying! Josh Bycer’s doesn’t count!
AsumSaus’ video this time, his first in 10 months, is about the most emblematic Melee stage: Final Destination. The boring stage, and its symbiotic relationship with most of the roster of Melee. Specifically, the group of players who don’t want to get killed by Fox, Falco, or sometimes Captain Falcon. (20 minutes) Enjoy, if you’re of a mind to enjoy that kind of thing. If anyone could cause you to care, it’s probably AsumSaus.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
oh god this hurts my ears (3 ½ minutes). it hurts so much that i’m typing this in lowercase because capital letters are too loud now.
its the most screamy of all game characters, that’s right toad. he’s singing. he’s singing real bad, and real loud. its funny if your ears can take it, i suggest though keeping the volume low. i’ll see you later, i’m going to listen to some whispery asmr.
the video dates back to 2018, and it has over ten million views. to each their own, i guess.
It makes the useful observation that the first programmable game system (that is, with interchangable cartridges that contained program code), the Fairchile Channel F, contained 2K of RAM to use as a framebuffer, a region of memory the system’s graphics controller referred to in building its display. Using a framebuffer simplifies video creation, but at the time RAM was very expensive.
The Atari VCS/2600, however, only has 128 bytes of on-board RAM. It doesn’t create a framebuffer, it doesn’t have enough memory. Instead the processor, a MOS 6507 (a variation of the 6502), works with the TIA graphics chip to build the signal in real-time. Effectively, the VCS has a one-dimensional display: it focuses on building the video signal by focusing on it one raster line at a time.
There’s a danger when talking about these things, of telling people something they already know. It’s been observed that some game facts that were once obscure are fairly well known among enthusiasts, like that Super Mario Bros. 2 was adapted from an earlier Japanese game called Doki Doki Panic. I feel like the unusual way the VCS constructed its graphics might be one of these things. I’m still fascinated by how it works though. I’ll probably end up bringing it up again someday.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Eggpo is a video game-themed series that was part of the “Two More Eggs” animations that The Brothers Chaps, Mike and Matt Chapman, creators and makers of Homestar Runner, made for Disney’s XD service. While the series is nine years old now, nearly all are still viewable on XD’s Youtube channel, minus a couple that were removed for some reason.
This is the fifth of the Eggpo cartoons, and clocks in at a minute-forty. We’ve seen the previous four here so far. They’re about a couple of Goomboid creatures from an 8-bit game questioning their places as underlings in video game world. They’re pretty good, and short. In this one, the Eggpos explore their game’s instruction manual. It’s not explained how they got in there.
There’s another game-related sequence in Two More Eggs, “CG Pals,” which follows the adventures of a bunch of low-polygon friends and their adventures in the Third Dimension. Since there’s only two Eggpo cartoons left, maybe we’ll look at those after Eggpo runs out.
Amazon has, in some areas at least, become a slop-pile, full of entries for misleading and scammy products. It seems just about anyone can advertise on Amazon for any product, including endless products with fake machine-generated brands, and flash drives that misreport their size as bigger than they really are and corrupt your data if you try to fill them.
These are just more recent versions of an old scam, computer-generated self-published works, with content stolen from other sources, and presented at new material. They’re not even LLM-generated, except maybe for a few sentences. The bulk of the content was written by others, people who have no idea their work is being appropriated to make a quick buck.
The five books Robin found, and bought to show off on his channel, are laughably fake. The computers pictured on the cover are the furthermost things from Commodore 64 machines, and the middle initial of their supposed authors consistently puts the period before the letter! They practically flaunt how easy it is to create AI slop, how little effort and money they must expend to get obviously fake books up, to sell to the maybe dozen people, tops, in the world today seeking info on how to program a forty-year-old 8-bit computer. (The books are copyright 2023, so at that time it merely a 38-year-old computer.)
The third book’s introduction in particular is great. All the books offer “Funny helpful tips” on the first page of content, but this one tells us to “incorporate activities that promote lymphatic drainage.” See! Look!
IMPORTANT FUNNY HELPFUL COMMODORE 64 LYMPHATIC TIPS
The stolen text, down to swiping the very images from the original, seems to come from this book from 2020, Beginner’s Step-by-Step THEC64 Coding Course by Rich Stals, a book written to support one of those recent-vintage, all-in-one platform revivals, the THEC64 Maxi.
Almost as infuriating as Amazon selling the same book under five different titles and with content pirates from a different book, the hoops they made Robin jump through to return them for a refund were a terrible experience, limiting him to picking an option to return them from a list, none of them being “this is an illegal copy of a different book.” Depending on the reason he picked, but not in any logical sense, he was offered a free copy of the same book in recompense. Awful.
Also on the subject of Commodore 64s…. I am still working feverishly on my Loadstar explorer menu program, which seeks to make leafing through the 22-year history of that C64 magazine much easier than having to individually open disks into an emulator and seek them out through the disks’ original menus. I hope to have something to share on that count very soon! Set Side B is a general (if esoteric) video gaming blog, we aren’t going to go all-out Commie for Commodore, but you might see a marked uptick in C64 info for awhile.
White Pointer Gaming is another excellent source of retro game hardware information, and a few days ago they uploaded a dive into the specifics of the real time clock used in Pokemon Generation 2 (14 minutes), and as an encore discussed Gameboy mapper chips, a related topic. It seems the clock hardware is on quite a few other GB games as well, as it’s built in to a common mapper chip, but it needs extra power to run the clock, and an oscillator to keep the time accurate. Another game that uses the same mapper, but doesn’t have the oscillator? Pokemon Generation One. Hmmm!
The video mentions that powering the clock and oscillator causes Pokemon Gold, Silver and Crystal cartridges to run out of battery power, and lose their saved game data, much faster than other Gameboy carts with save game battery. Sorry to break it to you; your Pokemon are probably gone by now. Poor out a health potion for Pikachu.
Another interesting fact revealed is, the clock works by recording raw time since the game was last powered on, and the actual date and time are fully updated when the game is started up. If you wait a long time between plays, over 511 days, the timer can wrap around and lose track of how long it’s been.
I’ve seem lots of really great pinball on Youtube, even though with every extra one you watch there’s a danger Youtube will think that’s all you want to see for a while.
This particular 22-minute video is special for a few reasons. First, it’s made by Bowen of PAPA, the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association, which means you’re gonna see some really good play. Second, it’s two nice games in a row, despite the game being set to tournament settings, meaning, game rules are at their hardest or nearly so, and there are no extra balls. And third, both games achieve a respectable score, but they do so by completely different strategies. The first one goes for multiballs exclusively, and gets to over 200M mostly through jackpots. The second pursues Mansion Rooms, which is slower and a little riskier, but gets to over 300M.
Addams Family is, as the video mentions, the best-selling pinball machine of all time. It’s got several unique features to it. In many pinball games the modes mostly differ by the available shots, but Addams Family has a mode, Seance, that turns on spinning magnets beneath the playfield (“FEEL the POWER!”), so the game actually plays differently, physically, while it’s running. It’s worth a lot of points, but it’s also very easy to lose control of the ball during it.
Multiball on Addams Family, as shown, can also be worth tons of points. The Power magnets also run during it, but shots to the side ramp during it are worth a minimum of 20 million. Addams Family is from an age where ball savers are rare, if there’s any at all, so there is a very strong possibility you’ll just immediately fail out of multiball with nothing to show for it. The game does let you try to restart multiball if you earn no jackpots, but you’ll only have to balls and could well just fail out again.
High-level pinball play is about both quick reactions and careful strategy. Don’t take shots on the fly if you can help it, but try to dampen the ball’s momentum, trap the ball on the flippers, and make as many controlled shots as possible. During multiball, try to get all but one ball on the flipper you want to use the least, and use the other one to make the important shots. If the ball is on the wrong flipper, try to get it to the other flipper safely, using techniques like “post transfers.”
Good pinball takes lots of practice, and sometimes unlearning habits, but it’s a kind of play that not many real-time video games can match. For pinball’s a very honest game, there is rarely anything the game can do to covertly sabotage you (if the machine is maintained well), but its skill ceiling is infinite. You can always play better.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Been focused so hard on the Loadstar Compleat project over the past couple of weeks that my brain can burn ANTS with just the power of SUNLIGHT. So have a quick one minute video of some people performing the music to the famous first level of DOOM, but with just the sound of their mouths.
The Internet was really turning into a big thing in the early 2000s, and a lot of companies hopped onto it to hawk their products. Nintendo was a little more standoffish about it than Sega, remember that the Sega Dreamcast had a built-in dial-up modem, and came with a web browser disk, while the Gamecube had no online functionality without the LAN adapter.
Web browsers would come to Nintendo platforms with the DS and Wii, and there are hints that they had at least considered it with the Gamecube (we’ll look into that tomorrow). But Nintendo did release PC web browsers, in order to help hype their games among internet savvy kids.
The programs in question were produced by Media Browser, who tried to turn branding-soaked web browsers into a viable business model. Media Browser is long gone (they lasted just two years), but some parts of their website are preserved on the Wayback Machine. Customized browsers produced were themed after Mario Tennis, Paper Mario, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Pokémon and Nintendo Power (thought it’s more of a Banjo-Tooie theme).
After Media Browser went out of business, another company, Braun Communications, stepped in and made three more browsers, it seems using the same software Media Browser did, for Metroid Prime and two more Pokémon games.
Under the hood they’re all reskins of Internet Explorer 5.0, so Media Browser/Braun wasn’t actually distributing web browsers per se as fancy borders to put around the browser that was already on Windows users’ machines. It also meant that Mac and Linux users weren’t allowed to have a Legend of Zelda web browsing experience: Ganondorf wins again. These were all free browser skins, but some of them showed ads to you, so you were essentially installing an ad banner directly to your machine for no useful benefit. Bonzi Buddy, eat your heart out.
So! What is using Nintendo’s branded web browsing solutions like today? Well first, even if you dig up the version of Windows they support (Win 95-98-ME era), they demand to be registered before use, and that site is long dead, so it’ll require a registry hack to put them through their paces. All of these browsers still exist on the Internet Archive, as linked on the video’s description section. Here’s direct links to the pages: one, two, three, four. If you look through them you might find some extras, like screensavers of the different properties. Those should still work, right?
If it seems that a lot of the “niche” items here ending up being about Nintendo things, you’re not wrong. The fact is, lots of people talk about Nintendo, both the Nintendo of old (N64, Gamecube, GBA, DS), the Nintendo of very old (NES, Gameboy, SNES), the Nintendo of very old (Donkey Kong, Game & Watch), and once in a while, the Nintendo of even older than that. They have been making gaming equipment since the 1800s, after all!
With all that Nintendo talk, I’m positively desperate to find non-Nintendo things older than a certain age. And once in a while, I even find them.
That’s what’s served up today, a video list of 11 secret things about the Space Quest games. The absence of Space Quest games in the current era is one of the worst things about it, if there was any DOS-era game series that could stand a comeback that is IT. But in that terrible absence, here is a 27 minute collection, from Space Quest Historian, of interesting things about those games:
Included items:
The Cave Squid in Space Quest II doesn’t actually chase you: it’s a set encounter in a specific location.
In SQ6, in the German and French localizations, designer Scott Murphy rerecorded some lines he spoke as himself, in those languages.
A cheat to skip some of the Scumsoft area in SQ3.
In the Aptitude Test in SQ5, you can either look over the shoulder of another test taker to get the answers… or just answer the last choice for each question. That’ll also get you past that sequence.
Some planet names in SQ5 are obvious jokes, but one of them that seems to be a jab at rival adventure maker Lucasarts is instead (or maybe, also) a reference to the last name of a couple of employees.
A Sarien guard in SQ1, if you talk to them many times, will eventually reveal that they’re a Kings Quest fan, and six points are locked behind this easter egg, making it difficult to score a perfect game without prior knowledge. As it turns out, Ken Williams put this gag in the game himself.
Space Quest Historian insists that the games, in general, were not made harder to sell hint books. Instead, it was to increase the length of the game, as if you know exactly what to do a typical Sierra adventure can be finished in less than an hour.
The Datacorder puzzle in SQ6 wasn’t intended as copy protection. It was supposed to be clued in the game itself, but an oversight meant it was left out of the game, so the clues were printed in the manual.
In SQ5, there was an unexpected case of the game taking it easy on the player. If you don’t complete a necessary puzzle, at the very end, before escaping a spaceship set to self-destruct, the game won’t kill you as a final punchline, but actually put you back for another try.
The Duracell Bunny, better known to US players as the Energizer Bunny, in SQ4… they actually got permission to include the joke, but from the wrong people. Still they were never sued, possibly because the inclusion flew under the owner’s radar.
Rereleases of Space Quest games sometimes changed some of the pop culture references to make them less legally actionable. In all but one case, however, this was done preemptively, and no legal threat was actually made. It was just their lawyers playing it safe. The one time they got a Cease and Desist was when they included likenesses of ZZ Top in the VGA release of SQ1. They fixed this in a novel way: the interpreter program scans the play directory for alternate resource files, and if it finds them, will include them as alternate animations. They “patched” the game for later pressings by putting alternate versions of the singers, shrunk down so far as to be unrecognizable. This seemed to satisfy the group’s lawyers. But the original graphics are still in the game; if the alternate resource files are deleted (or just moved out of the directory), the ZZ Top parody will reappear.
If all of this is interesting to you, I encourage you to watch the video, where all of these things are illustrated in-game, and explained in far greater detail. Look and see!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Let’s watch a good old fashioned crazypants video. From MangoSauce. In this one (2 minutes), Toad reveals a number of disturbing beliefs to Mario. Things escalate, and they escalate, and they keep going. Well see for yourself:
See? As crazy as a box of rotating weasels. Well that’s what I got this week. See ya.
A while back I linked to a video showing the obscure “Data Over Flow” error in Mario Paint. Here’s the post, and here’s the video (1 minute):
It occurs because Mario Paint’s SRAM is only 32K in size, which isn’t large enough to store every possible creation. The cartridge uses data compression to squeeze everything in, but the thing about data compression is, it can never be guaranteed to work. Every possible compression format has data that will cause it to take up more space. It’s a fact about the universe we live in. It just is.
If you only use the canvas, or only use the “Animation Land” motion option, then there is enough RAM, but using both in one composition means the software relies on compression to make everything fit, meaning, some kinds of data won’t fit, and that’s when Data Over Flow happens.
But as it turns out, while if you’re using Mario Paint in the way most people it’s unlikely you’ll trigger the error, it isn’t actually difficult to cause it. Creating a random mess of all the colors of pixels in a stamp, then filling the whole canvas and all the animation frames with that stamp, seems to be enough to do it. Mario Party doesn’t use a particular complex compression format. Maybe if it used something lossy like JPEG it might be able to do it, but rather it uses bit-perfect compression. That kind likes repeating patterns and areas of solid color, and doesn’t like what I’m going to call rainbow snow.
So here, watch a user start from a blank project, on real SNES hardware recorded through video capture, and go directly to the Data Over Flow error. Sorry! Our RAM is too sick to contain your masterpiece, it has vomited it all up, please try again (3 minutes):
