Tag: video

AsumSaus Relates the Story of aMSa, Player of Yoshi

Yep, we link a lot of videos. Sadly a lot of gaming stuff now takes the form of videos. Text is my preference, but it’s where the content is right now.

And this isn’t the first time we’ve linked to AsumSaus, whose beat is the competitive Smash Melee scene. There’s lots of Youpotatoes out there, but AsumSaus appeals to me greatly. His videos aren’t edited into a confusing mess, they don’t sound like morning zoo radio hosts on crack, there aren’t lots of swishy objects moving around. It’s surprising how many Youtubers spend so much effort making their videos unwatchable, but AsumSaus isn’t one of them. They’re accessible, entertaining, interesting, and sane. All around, great.

Most of AsumSaus’ videos are around 10 minutes long, but this time we have a long-form video, at 54 minutes it’s almost movie-length, but it’s worth it. It’s the story of aMSa, a Japanese player of Super Smash Bros Melee. It turns out Japan is not a great scene for competitive Smash Melee, the best players are widely considered to be in the US and Europe. Not only that, but for much of his career professional Melee was only a side-gig for him, he held down a demanding day job in his home country, and had to travel to tournament events when he could.

But none of those things are the most surprising thing about aMSa. The most surprising thing is that aMSa plays Yoshi. He’s the only top-tier Melee player who does.

When he began, Yoshi was considered F-Tier. To explain to those not familiar with competitive fighting game terminology, the community around games tends to sort the characters into “tiers,” each containing characters considered to be of roughly equivalent strength. Usually these are rated alphabetically, with “S” given an honorary place at the top of the list, according to gaming custom. So, S-tier characters are the best, A-tier characters are second best, and so on down. Usually the worst at F-tier, or even a little lower. Sometimes, if one character really rules, they might be rated SS-tier, or even potentially SSS-tier.

In 2010, the tier list for Smash Melee characters was considered to be this:

At the top of the heap are Fox, whose positive Melee attributes have been a meme for many years now, Falco (who plays very similarly to Fox), Jigglypuff (the best floater in Melee, and who also has Pound for extra saves and Rest for instant kills), and Sheik, who is almost as fast as Fox. In Melee, Sheik could turn into Zelda with a move. No one does this though, because Zelda is way down in Tier F. Tier F characters are widely considered to suck. But, another character in tier F is Yoshi.

Why is Yoshi rated so badly? The obvious reasons (well, obvious to people familiar with Smash Bros) are: Yoshi doesn’t have an up+B save move (it throws an egg instead of serving as a third jump); and, Yoshi’s shield is unusual, encasing them in an egg instead of providing the usual bubble-shield, and Yoshi can’t jump immediately out of it. Yoshi has positive aspects too, but those two are pretty huge.

More recent tier lists for Melee all rate Yoshi much more highly. But it’s not because a lot of players have achieved a good rate of success with Yoshi. It’s entirely because of aMSa. One player, out of hundreds, is the reason Yoshi was rated at B+ tier in 2021, and that’s aMSa.

I don’t want to give away the ending of AsumSaus’ video. aMSa doesn’t win every match, in fact they lose a great many, because in tournaments they play against the very best in the world. But they do experience a lot of success, and beyond that, they seem to be genuinely a good person. aMSa is almost always smiling after a match, win or lose, because they’re having a great time. They’re always gracious to their opponent. It’s easy to get on their side. Crowds love them too.

Here, then, is the journey of aMSa, and their red Yoshi. A top-level professional Smash Melee player, with the least likely character. And be sure to stick around for the very end, as AsumSaus picked the best-possible ending music for the video.

aMSa: The Only Yoshi (who could do it) (Youtube, 54 minutes)

A Video on Nintendo Manga

I’m working on something big for you all, but it’ll take some time to get ready. So to free up time for working on that, here’s something I’ve been saving, a Youtube video exploring manga based on Nintendo characters, from the account of S Class Anime. Enjoy!

Exploring the World of Nintendo Manga (Youtube, 20 minutes)

More on the Terribleness of NES Strider’s Programming

A while ago Displaced Gamers, as part of their great Behind The Code series, did a video about how awful NES Strider’s sprite updating was. Arcade Strider was huge hit and outright masterpiece, a great arcade platformer released right before fighting games took over game rooms around the world, but NES Strider was a wretched thing, full of big ideas but with code woefully unable to live up to them. Imagine a puppy trying to do your taxes. It might put up an adorable effort, but it’s just not going to get the job done.

We linked to their last video examining its malformed construction. Well, Strider is the well of crap that keeps on gushing, and so Displaced Gamers has another video on the subject of the flaws in its programming, this time about its player physics. Walking into walls causes Strider Hiryu to shudder in place; jumping beneath a low ceiling causes him to bump his head repeatedly as his jump continues even though there’s no room to ascent; and his infamous “triangle” wall jump is so wonky that it literally requires a frame-perfect input to pull off, and not even the right frame. You have to jump the frame before you contact the wall!

Here is the new video, which explicates the entire cruddy system. It goes into exquisite/excruciating detail, including tracing the code and examining Hiryu’s X and Y coordinates on a frame-by-frame basis. It’s the kind of deep geekery that I just know you love/hate! Enjoy/despair!

The Physics Nightmare and Bizarre Jumping of Strider (NES) – Behind The Code (19 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Remade Opening to Grim Fandango

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

Over on Newgrounds, Yespeace1 remade the opening to the classic 3D Lucasarts adventure game Grim Fandango in Blender. They adhered to nearly everything about the original, so don’t expect a tremendous amount of improvement, but when the first version was so great anyway that hardly matters. The Youtube version is linked below, since it’ll embed here cleanly.

Grim Fandango Resurrected, on Youtube and Newgrounds (3 minutes)

A Double Indie Review of Batboy and Strayed Lights

This is a double indie game review of Batboy and Strayed Lights done with press keys provided by the developers. If you would like me to look at your game for a future review, please reach out.

0:00 Intro
00:14 Batboy
5:18 Strayed Lights

Atari Archives Covers VCS Pac-Man

This is a big one. Youtube channel Atari Archives usually makes videos that average around 16 minutes in length, with the occasional entry that goes up to twenty or, once in a while, even thirty minutes. Their entry on Atari VCS/2600 Pac-Man, the infamous title that many claim destroyed the video game market in the US in 1983, goes for 38 minutes. (Their side episode on the Bally Astrocade is 48 minutes long, but it covers the history of an entire platform.)

The video’s states a thing that I have long suspected: Atari 2600 Pac-Man did not itself destroy the game console industry. I also don’t think the other prime suspect, Atari E.T., did it.

If you pressed me, I’d think that both may have been contributing factors, but only as part of a larger trend: stores shelves were inundated with a flood of games at the time, as lots of companies jumped heedlessly into the software market. The opportunity created by Activision, which was famously founded by Atari programmers upset by how they were treated there, which established in court that it was legal for competitors to make their own software for a company’s system, was soon taken advantage of by dozens of other outfits. For every Activision and Imagic, however, there were a bevy of Apollos and Froggos, whose mostly terrible games, in that pre-Internet era, looked about as good to a typical buyer.

Plus, I think there was an element of the bursting of a fad at that time. The success of the Atari 2600 was possibly unsustainable. Even the widely ridiculed VCS port of Pac-Man sold over seven million copies, a sales record that wouldn’t be matched until the middle of the NES’s life.

For more information on the game, and its many other contemporary ports, I refer you to the video.

Atari Archives: Episode 66, Pac-Man (38 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Cooking With Louie

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

Pikmin 2 introduced Olimar’s disreputable underling Louie. (Their names are an in-joke: “Olimar” is mostly the syllables in “Mario” in reverse order, and Louie thus references Luigi.)

Whereas Olimar is mostly trying to get home, or else earn money to pay off his company’s debts, Louie is mostly along because he’s a working stiff, or else perhaps because he loves the taste of planet PNF-404’s native wildlife. Olimar’s entries on the creatures in Pikmin 2’s Piklopedia take a naturalistic, even scientific, style, Louie’s mostly concern the best way to prepare each beast for the dinner table. It a humorous little detail, and one of Pikmin 2’s most charming elements.

Wooden Turtle on Youtube has made a stop motion animation of a new cooking show on Hokotate television featuring the starfaring chef, titled Cooking With Louie. But sadly it doesn’t go that well, due to the regenerative properties of one of the critters being prepared. And someone should get those camerapikmin unionized immediately.

An extra: from Napkins X, a line of Pikmin dancing to everyone’s favorite decade-old dance hit.

Sundry Sunday: Doobus Goobus Doesn’t Care for Freddy Fazbear

…and neither do I.

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

By the way, I made this post while sitting in Peachtree Center in Atlanta the Wednesday before DragonCon 2023! Hello! These posts will probably be somewhat low effort, but they’re still coming! It beats being back home in Brunswick, GA this weekend where Hurricane Idalia is smacking things around!

I Don’t Care For Freddy FazBear (45 seconds)

Famicom Family BASIC

I love BASIC! I don’t make a secret of it. It was the product, even before DOS, that launched Microsoft. It was invented to be the language to bring programming to the masses, and, for a short time, it fulfilled that function. (These days, if you want to learn coding, I suggest Python. Not only is it a lot more capable and modern, but you can actually get a job writing it.)

Used to be if you had a new computer you wanted families to buy, you had to have a version of BASIC to ship with it. The Apple II had two, one written by Steve Wozniak himself. Right off the top of my head, computer systems with BASIC, go! Altair, Apple II, Commodore Pet, Vic-20, 64, 128, Plus-4, 16, Atari 8-bit, TRS-80, MS-DOS, Windows (Visual BASIC carried the torch for many years), and, most improbably, the Atari VCS/2600, in its BASIC Programming cartridge, an effectively useless cart for its stated purpose that’s nonetheless an excellent hack. The machine has 128 bytes of RAM, but it can still run BASIC, by jove.

The Famicom has a version of BASIC too, coming in at the end of the language’s heyday. Over on the Peertube instance diode.zone, user RE:Enthused did a two-part introduction to it that may be of interested to people who still think in terms of FOR/NEXT loops.

Let’s look at Family Basic on the Famicom, Part 1 (8 minutes) and Part 2 (17 minutes).

Sundry Sunday: The Groovy Long Legs Experience

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

In the year + one half we’ve been doing this, we’ve dug up a lot of varied things for Sundays. This one’s pretty short, but still, the fact they made it in stop motion is respectable. (At least I assume it’s stop motion. They could have made it in a computer I guess, but then, why make look like it was stop motion? Some kind of Lego Movie stylistic flex?)

Anyway, it’s another Pikmin 4 video. Pikmin 4 is not as sharply designed as Pikmins 1 or 3, it takes after 2 (it has caves, and even has one starring that game’s most infamous boss, the Waterwraith), but even the flabbiest Pikmin game is still a wonderful thing to behold.

This video covers is about an actual boss battle in Pikmin 4. Previous games had you fight monsters in the Long Legs family: the Beady Long Legs from Pikmin 1, the Raging Long Legs from 2, the Shaggy Long Legs from 3 and now… the Groovy Long Legs. This video is not confabulating much: it shines lights around, plays music, and your Pikmin actually do get down when you’re fighting it–which usually results in them getting turn into Pikmin Paste. Time to reload the floor….

The Groovy Long Legs Experience (Youtube, one minute)

Twinbeard Plays Super Mario Galaxy One Star A Day

Twinbeard is Jim Stormdancer, who’s on Mastodon. He created Frog Fractions, and its mysterious sequel. But these things are irrelephant to the subject of this post, which is that he’s playing Super Mario Galaxy, one star a day, and posting his play to Youtube.

There’s a playlist of the 51 (as of this writing) stars, and none of them have many hits right now. It’s possible that he does them in batches and just posts one a day, but that’s fine. It’s nice to just follow along at this pace.

Twinbeard hasn’t fallen prey to something I hate about the video internet, which I could complain of as TikTokification, but honestly there are people on TikTok who aren’t nearly as bad as some on Youtube. And Youtube was trending towards it anyway, with their often unwatchable Shorts section serving as just an extreme example of pre-existing trends. It may just be my advancing age, but I really really really dislike much of what I see on Shorts, and Twinbeard’s videos are a nice alternative to it.