Not a lot to say about this one that isn’t in the title. Maybe the fact that it’s two minutes long.
Wii Eshop theme on motherboard error code piezoelectric speaker (Youtube, 2 minutes)
Wii Shop Theme Played on a 1-Bit Speaker
Tag: video
Sundry Sunday: Link Breakdances in Gerudo Outfit
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s not always easy to find these kinds of videos? Youtube’s hated algorithm is heavily influenced by the last things you watched, so if you get in a mood to watch restorations of old arcade games, it doesn’t take many of those until your homepage is loaded with them, to the exclusion of other things.
And honestly, who beside me is going to link to videos like this, an animation of Link in Breath of the Wild, in the much appreciated by fans Gerudo Outfit, breakdancing out in the desert, with unexpected accompaniment? That’s what Sundays here are for folks. Showing you the things that Youtube doesn’t want you to see, if only by accident (30 seconds).
When you’re attacking Vah Naboris but the music is really good (Youtube, animated, 30 seconds)
100 Commodore Plus/4 Games
I’ve brought up the Commodore Plus/4 before, an odd system that seems poorly suited as a follow-up to the massively successful Commodore 64. It was the host system for Pac-Pac, a Pac-Man-like game made in recent years for the Plus/4, a system that’s, compared to the C64, really doesn’t seem meant for games. The video that’s our subject today is just a collection of quick views, I mean just a few seconds each, of 100 Plus/4 games, for the reason that there being even one seems like a challenge. Here is the video (17 minutes). Why? I’ll save that for after the embed.
The Commodore 64 had its strengths and weaknesses. It had hardware sprites, but only 8 of them, each with at most three colors, and even for that you had to trade off half their horizontal resolution. It had smooth scrolling, but it required the processor to move every byte of the screen itself, a feat that was actually impossible on unaided hardware within one frame’s time. (Well, there was a way to do it, discovered fairly recently, but it’s bizarrely dangerous. I’ll describe that some other time.) It had a very good sound chip for its time, but it only had three voices. It had 64K of RAM, but some of it was very difficult to access, and a quirk of the system’s design mean that some of it couldn’t ever be used by the graphics chip. And it had a floppy drive true, but in the rush to release it it ended up with a terrible flaw, making the 1541 floppy drive the slowest disk drive of all the 8-bit micros, giving rise to a whole category of fastload software.
The Commodore 64’s greatest strength was its very low price. Founder Jack Tramiel upended the calculator market with a very low cost calculator, and pulled he same trick on microcomputers with the C64, which sold for just $200 for much of its life. The Plus/4 sold for more than that for the scant year it was offered, abandoning its predecessor’s main advantage. To make up for it, it had a word processor, database and spreadsheet included in ROM. The Plus/4 was intended as a business machine, which is a shame, because businesses could afford PC clones. The C64 was properly seen as a games machine. A C64 without its game-friend features was not going to make it.
The Plus/4 had much worse sound support, no scrolling support, and worst of all, no hardware sprites. No sprites means moving objects have to be done either with tile graphics (wasteful in terms of tiles) or a bitmapped screen (slow). It did have a couple of advantages though. It had support for many more colors, up to 121 of them, and its processor, another version of the 6502, was clocked quite a bit faster.
Still, regarding games on the Plus/4, as the adage goes, it’s amazing that the dog talks at all. Every game in the video, old and new, should be regarded as something of a triumph.
Jeremy Parish Covers SMS Shinobi
I’m sure I’ve said this before, but Youtube is largely a wasteland when it comes to game opinion, criticism and history media. Generally, if it has to do with games, you have to sift through a whole lot of crap to get to the good stuff.
The gold standards in this wretched field are Dr Sparkle’s Chrontendo and spinoff serieses, which seek to review every NES and Famicom game in a decade-plus quest, and Jeremy Parish’s NES Works and its own spinoffs. Our post’s topic today has to do with one of those spinoffs, SMS Works, which has at last come to one of the Sega Master System’s defining titles: Shinobi.
One of the best things about Jeremy’s videos is the context they bring. They try hard to mention other games that came out around the same time, and how ideas would be bandied about between the different developers, repeated and refined. His videos are the only source I know of that would realize, that could realize, that Shinobi was heavily influenced by Namco’s spies-vs-tokusatsu-creeps arcade game Rolling Thunder.
So then, at 15 minutes long, here is that video.
SMS Works: Shinobi (Youtube, 15 minutes)
Possibly the First US Commercial For a Nintendo Product
Generally it’s considered that arcade Donkey Kong was the product that put Nintendo on the video game map, but Nintendo’s Game & Watch line actually predates it by a year. They licensed it to Mego, the company that made those highly collectable large-scale action figures of pop culture characters, and Micronauts.
The Video Game History Foundation found Mego’s commercial for “TOSS UP,” what they called Ball, and branded under their name for Game & Watch products, “Time Out,” and put it–guess where? Yeah it’s on Youtube again (46 seconds):
Sundry Sunday: brentalfloss’ DK Rap 2018 (NSFW)
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Six years ago brentalfloss did a parody video of the infamous “DK Rap” from the opening of Donkey Kong 64, updated for the times. It’s hilarious, but also disturbing and sad. Summary: Donkey Kong became a gun nut, Diddy is a MRA incel jerk, because of Tiny bees are dying out, Lanky’s the reason this video is NSFW, and Chunky’s… well, you can find out for yourself.
It’s all pretty saddening, but truthfully in line with how game culture has gotten worse over the years too. Ah well, at least Parappa’s still good and pure!
DK Rap 2018, “Where are they now” (brentalfloss on Youtube, 4 minutes)
NESHacker’s Guide to the NES Hardware
More and more I find I should do a blog search to make sure that I haven’t posted something before, and my search for this video didn’t find it. It did find our link to the Copetti Site’s discussion of various console architectures, and a separate link specifically to their explication of the SNES’ construction, but not this particular video from NESHacker, so it’s fair game. Post! (zoop)
It’s only about nine minutes long so you can guess that it doesn’t go into deep detail. Essentially the NES is split into two parts, the CPU and its memory, and the PPU graphics chip and its own memory. A lot of classic consoles and microcomputers had to take special measures to support their display, which often ended up being the most complex part of the unit. Think about it: you have what amounts to a deluxe broadcast character generator right there in a box on your desk, shelf or floor, with lots of extra bells and whistles besides. (In fact, home computers were often used to generate current events channels for local cable companies, and an Amiga was essentially the basis for the old Prevue Guide channel.) It’s like a tiny special-purpose, single-receiver TV station just for your own use.
Graphics hardware is extremely timing sensitive. It has to generate the signal for your TV to display according to standardized picture generation requirements, so special requirements are often necessary. In the Commodore 64, for instance, the VIC-II graphics chip has the power to actually put the 6510 CPU to sleep, so it can have unrestricted access to the computer’s memory, without fear of bus conflicts, when it’s needed. This reduces the overall speed of the processor by a bit, and it’s why C64s turn off the screen when loading programs from cassette tape, in order to keep the CPU timing consistent relative to the data being streamed in off the tape.
The NES gets around this by giving the PPU RAM and address bus for its own exclusive use, and to put stuff in it the CPU has to use the PPU as an intermediary. And what’s more the NES exposes both the CPU and PPU’s address busses through the cartridge connector (which is why it’s got so many pins), allowing carts to supply dedicated ROM and RAM to both chips.
Even though it’s just a high-level overview, I found it a worthwhile use of those nine minutes, and you may very well enjoy it too.
NES Hardware Explained (from NESHacker, on Youtube, 9 minutes)
Sundry Sunday: Steamed Hams, But It’s An NES Game
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
So despite the fact that you likely already know all of this, I still feel like I have to explain it all for people who might not have soaked their brains in US popular culture, yet still care enough about video games that you’re reading Set Side B. Let’s get it out of the way as quickly as feasible.
Premiering December 17, 1989, The Simpsons has been on the air for approaching 35 years. We in the United States are going to have to come to terms with the fact that it’ll probably be the reigning television fact of our lives. When it began, the NES was still the hot game system, and that was eons ago.
Premiering in the 7th season, during the time when most people still agreed The Simpsons was the best show on television, was the episode 22 Short Films About Springfield, in which the writers created a loosely-connected sequence of miscellaneous stories about the many side characters in The Simpsons. One of those stories was “Seymour and the Superintendent,” where Bart’s principal hosts his boss Superintendent Chalmers to a home-cooked meal, but due to a sequence of comical events serves him Krusty Burgers instead, covers it up in a variety of unlikely lies, and nearly burns down his house. Colloquially this has become known as “Steamed Hams,” after one of the lies Principal Skinner tells.
In 2017, a popular meme went around the internet in which people remade, remixes, or otherwise re-did that story, alone of all of them in the episode, the season, and among the long long run of the show.
In fact, those memes are still being made, and this post’s subject is one of them. It’s a video simulating what a Steamed Hams game would have been like if it were made in the style of the Bart vs the Space Mutants and Bart vs The World games on the NES. It was made by Penney Pixels, it’s four minutes long, and it’s here, and here:
There is an actual game version of the Steamed Hams, of which a playthrough is recorded here, and can be downloaded here. There’s another version of Steamed Hams too, and it can be played on GameJolt here. Both of those are adventure games.
I thought Steamed Hams had come up here before, but a quick search didn’t find anything, so I’ll just leave it at this. I’m sure in the next 35 years there will be hundreds more game versions of Steamed Hams. Maybe after all that time, I’ll be able to bring myself to mention it here again.
Inty Sports and the IBL
The end of Blaseball continues to leave a large squid-shaped hole in what I’m going to, for the sake of argument, call our hearts, but there are alternatives out there. One such alternative is Inty Sports, and the IBL: the Intellivision Baseball League.
Forget about hacking Tecmo Bowl or the like to include modern stats, this goes all the way back to arguably the first complete home console baseball simulation, back on the first console that made decent sports adaptations a reality.
Since 2014, each year, over the course of around three-and-a-half months, a league of ten teams with names based on Intellivision properties battle it out for the title of IBL Champions. I don’t know if human players back the teams or if they’re all computer-played, but it seems probable that it’s the latter. Intellivision’s Baseball (originally marketed with the Major League Baseball license) is a decent adaptation, although there are some rule changes as described on its Wikipedia page: no fly balls are simulated, home runs are declared based on “how and where” the ball is hit, and if a run is scored before the third out on a play, it counts.
Intellivision Baseball is from an era before consoles tracked stats, named players, or even offered selectable teams, so any strengths and weaknesses on a given team are merely the result of statistical variance. If you can allow yourself to forget about that detail, though, you might allow yourself to be amused, for a period of time ranging from minutes to multiple years.
Each game progresses rapidly, and is over in a brisk 9 to 11 minutes, which is much better than real-life baseball. Inty Sports has a website with the records of past seasons, and a page of greatest moments. Their 2024 season wrapped up just a few weeks ago, and can be viewed on their Youtube channel. Here is the final game of the 2024 season, Spartans vs Bombers (11 minutes):
A Japanese Youtuber Plays Rogue
I only have the barest understanding of Japanese, and the auto-translation on this video is pretty bad*, but I still found this Japanese Youtuber’s experience with the Steam release of Epyx Rogue to be interesting (27 minutes):
They keep using terms from Chunsoft’s Mystery Dungeon games, especially Torneko no Daibouken from the Super Famicom, but seem to have a good sense of how those items connect to and were inspired by Rogue.
They also die a lot. Because Rogue doesn’t want you to win. It was made for a community of players who would play it over and over, and were competing on shared scoreboards on university machines, and indefinite play makes for a poor measure of player skill. Standing and trading blows with every monster is a bad strategy in Rogue in the long run. Instead, it helps to run from strong enemies, to build up more hit points so as to defeat them, and sometimes in order to escape them to the next floor. Rogue’s monsters grow in strength as you descend fairly quickly, and the player is usually not far ahead of them in the power curve. Then around the time Trolls show up they’re roughly an even match, and they keep getting tougher. The point where the monsters become stronger than the player is different every game, and depends a lot on which items the player has found and has identified, but it always comes eventually. They eventually get pretty far, dying on their fifth attempt to a Griffin on Level 18.
*
“Water supply texture: Say goodbye to the smell of raw oysters.”
“The Dora doll’s twisty honey positive is getting warmer.”
“I miss the days when I used to go Hee Hee in Centauros.”
“Let’s quickly wash and throw away the rotten plastic bottles we drank from.”
Tell me more, auto translate bot!
Sega’s Amazing Island for Gamecube
I remember seeing this game for sale back then. It looked, on store shelves, a whole lot like a Pokemon clone. It’s not like we had any lack for them at the time.
Reading the back of the case made it clear something else was going on. Amazing Island was actually an early form of creativity game, like Drawn to Life, or Spore for that matter. Instead of collecting pre-made monsters, you made your own! Starting from one of a number of skeleton types, you used the Gamecube controller to draw shapes around it, that the game would then animate to bring your creation to life. Not a bad concept!
Worse was the execution, what you’d actually do with your creatures after they were made. Ideally the game would somehow use the contours and colors you attached to your newborn monstrosity to give it statistics, and then you could command it into full-animated battle against other monsters. Instead, you were given a variety of minigames to use your monster in, which didn’t have the same appeal. Rather than having Pokemon-style moves, they played a number of variations on volleyball, or racing, or some such.
Youtuber Camobot put the game through its paces in a 14-minute review. Here it is:
I think the video has its faults, but it mostly serves its purpose of presenting a noble experiment that never got a rerelease, and might earn a cult following today if it were. I wonder especially, if the Dreamcast hadn’t failed, if Amazing Island might have seen release on it, or on its successor if one had happened. It didn’t seem to sell too well on the Gamecube, and it probably would have done even worse on the PS2 or Xbox.
The failure of games like Amazing Island at market is why most games are largely similar by-the-numbers products nowadays, that don’t take risks but are made to ensure a modest yet predictable profit. This is why, when you see a game that you might like that looks like it might really try something different, you should take the plunge, if you are able, and check it out. Until developers are better incentivized for taking chances making novel and unique games, they’ll have to stick to churning out the bland gruel that still moves copies, and no one really likes that, not the players, and not even the devs.
Sundry Sunday: Brendoon’s Live-Action Earthbound Videos
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
They’re strange ones this week friends. This person on Youtube has made a handful of short videos depicting moments from the classic Super Nintendo JRPG Earthbound in real life.
The best ones are “For Sale” Sign (37 seconds) and Arms Dealer (49s).
Earthbound is full to bursting with weird situations like these. Brendoon could keep making videos for some time. Maybe concerning the Insignificant Item? Or having pizza delivered to you in the dungeon? Or beating up fire hydrants? Or running from dinosaurs? Or automatically putting ketchup on food items you eat? Or being spoken to by cups of coffee? Or the world being threatened by an 11-year-old boy? Or anything having to do with ᨓꭱ. یƌ⍭⊔ꭱη? The list is nearly endless!