Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I never got into the Pokemon Trading Card Game scene. I never got into Magic either. The thing about trading card games, I’ve always said, sometimes twice in a row even, is they seem more like a business model than a game.
It’s not that they don’t have good design, really, but that the purpose of that game is to make it so that players buy more cards. And despite that, whenever I bring this up among obsessed players, they say it doesn’t take money to win. No, but it makes winning much more likely. More money gets you more cards, and statistically, that means you get better cards. More money means you can outright buy better cards from traders. Money rules all, just like it does in the actual real physical world, and that’s something I play games to escape.
Recently the Pokemon Company released a second app version of their money-printing game. This one promises streamlined rules, and lets you get booster packs without paying cash, although being “free to play,” monetization is sadly a big part of the game.
Word is, it is also infuriatingly difficult to win at, an experience that TerminalMontage, creator of the “Something About” series of animations, captures aptly in their new animation. (8 minutes)
My opinion of the Something About cartoon is scattered. There’s some funny episodes in there, but it also relies a lot on the “earsplitting scream EXPLOSION” gag. It happens at least once in this video. And sometimes it substitutes hyper-energy for actual jokes. Yet, hidden amidst the LOLrandom, the goodonesreallyaregood. Will you find this one to be so? There’s but one way to find out.
The Home Run Contest in Super Smash Bros. is such a unique part of the game. It began in Melee (the second Smash Bros. game, the one on Gamecube) and has reliably returned in each version since then.
In Super Smash Bros.’ normal mechanics, characters attack each other to increase their opponent’s damage percentage. The higher a character’s damage, effectively, the lighter they become, and the easier they are to knock around with strong attacks. The object is to knock the opponent so far away that they leave the arena, either so they fall off the main platform and off the bottom of the screen, or so far to the side or top that they cross a kill line and are defeated.
The standoff: a character, a sandbag, and a bat.
The Home Run Contest is a solo mode where the kill line is removed on the right side of the screen. The arena scrolls infinitely to the right. On a platform on the left edge is a special opponent character, Sandbag-kun, or just Sandbag, who’s just a large cylindrical mass with a couple of eyes. Sandbag has no moves, and mostly just stands there. The aim is, to wrack up as much damage as you can over 10 seconds, then use the strongest attack your character has to knock it to the right. To assist in this, the game hands you a Home Run Bat, the game’s strongest attack item, to send it off with. The distance Sandbag flies is determined by the strength of your attack and the damage you’ve done to it. The game records the highest distance each character has been able to send it, and adds them all together for an overall record.
As is predictable for a game as fussed-over as Smash Melee, over the 26 years since its players have come up with all kinds of ridiculous strategies for flinging it downscreen. Later Smash games would do things like have the sun rise and fall as it spins through the air, but Smash Melee just lets it sail through the sky.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder is 15 months old now, and as is usual for games this far out, the hype around it has died down. But this video, and its information, has been in my to-post file for a long time, so let’s get it checked off of my list.
There is a level with a boss fight against Bowser Jr. where he makes himself really small (accidentally), then really large, and the player’s size changes to the opposite: really big, then really tiny. The player’s physics change to reflect their new volume.
As it turns out, this effect is, in a way, faked. During this whole fight, the player’s size doesn’t change at all! Instead, the room changes size, and the camera is zoomed in or out so it’s not noticeable. Junior’s size actually changes twice as much. The changes to the player’s physics are applied on top of this state.
Rimea on Youtube made a video, like a whole year ago, that applied the Wonder effects from the boss fight in normal levels, and the player’s character doesn’t change size at all there, there’s the physics changes and that’s all. Then they put some other objects in the room, some question mark blocks, and they change size along with the room, making the camera gimmick a bit more obvious.
Here is their video explaining and demonstrating how the effect is done (6m). Why is it implemented like this? My guess is that the player movement routines in Mario games are really complex and detailed, and any time when it comes to a decision whether to change it or something else, the developers do everything they can to not mess with the precise and exacting parts of the engine, for fear of breaking some other obscure part of the game. The player program has to be used throughout the whole game, while the boss and its room are only used in one part, so it risks breaking fewer things to put the changes all on them. That’s how I see it, yeah.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
You know, it’s a effort sometimes to keep up this weekly game culture section. Youtube’s algorithm sucks unless you have an account you use for one purpose and none other, for it’s always trying to send you things related to the very last thing you watched. That means its efficacy as a source of finds varies widely and wildly.
Today’s find, however, is the kind of insanity that makes the effort worth it. It’s no thanks to the Youtube feed either, but from a Bluesky post. As it turns out, they made a music video for Lemmings 2, involving adorable Lemming puppets (4m).
It’s kind of an old subject now. The Legend of Zelda was originally released in 1985, and right with the next game, Nintendo started toying with the formula.
The third game in the series, A Link to the Past, is widely revered among classic game-players, but there’s been this small coterie, growing over the years, that despite greatly improved graphics and controls, a much greater variety in enemies, like 13 dungeons in all and a host of cool secrets, in some ways it’s not up to the original. And the darn thing is, I agree with them.
The Legend of Zelda is kind of the victim of being left behind by design trends, in some ways. Link to the Past is an inflection point; while TLoZ is infuriatingly vague in some ways, and very challenging, some players latched onto those aspects and relished the challenge. Its second-sequel is almost luxurious in how it tells the player how to progress. There are establishments around the fantasy world of Hyrule whose whole purpose is to tell you what to do next. That’s great for making a generally-playable game, but if you want to figure the game out yourself, like solving a great puzzle, it’s lacking.
Its secrets are much less secret. It feels like the world wants you to discover its hidden caves, imagine that. Of the differences between the two, most players preferred the new direction, as did developers, not the least being the makers of the Zelda games themselves.
Of the fans who recognize the first game’s gnomish inscrutability and obscure secrets as a strength, probably the best-known advocate has been Tevis Thompson, who made the case in his 13-year-old essay Saving Zelda. He followed up some of the ideas in the graphic novel Second Quest (which is great), but it more goes in its own directions.
That was where the discussion stood, until the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. After over a dozen games that leaned in to the Link to the Past template, it seemed to represent a rejection of that whole line, of the very trends they themselves had started and build upon. Instead of the mechanistic puzzlebox world, where exploration is carefully gated and players can’t get themselves into situations they’re not ready for, they threw open the doors. Here, have a world not only much bigger than any previous Zelda, but one of the biggest worlds in gaming period. Go anywhere, right from the start! While the secrets are still not that secret, the vast land obscures their locations pretty well, so it adds up to about the same effect.
Breath of the Wild was the first Zelda game that largely felt like Game #1, and there are signs this was intentional. The Japanese release made direct references to the 1985 original, using the font from the cover of the original game for its own title screen and to announce locations, have a look:
Comparison image from (ugh) r/zelda
When the game first game out, there was bewilderment, but players were very appreciative, but, did this mean all Zeldas were going to be vast open-world exploration games now? Tears of the Kingdom seems to indicate, maybe! Then Echoes of Wisdom last year showed that, while that game itself had many changes to the formula (such as actually starring the title character), they had not abandoned the classic formula, or look either.
All of this is to introduce the video by ThePlinkster, which like Thompson did in 2012, makes the case that the first game is still, largely, the best, and it even claims it’s better than BotW, which might be a bit of a reach. It’s 18 minutes, and while I don’t really agree with him entirely, he doesn’t make his case badly. Here it is:
I remember the days when everyone marveled at how many ways to die there were in Nethack. Remember Nethack? Good old Nethack.
Multiple long ages of the internet ago, famed nethacker Boudewijn Wayers wrote a spoiler called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game. It was published on his long-gone Nethack Home Page, but copies of it remain scattered around the internet, although currently I can only find one copy on Google, from a page on tecfa.unige.ch. I’m quite sad that this venerable piece of hack lore is in danger of extinction, at least to people who don’t know the magic codes to enter on the Wayback Machine.
To Die is a wonderful bit of roguelike lore, so great that I’m posting it in full here soon to help preserve it. But today’s focus is on a more recent variation of it: a Youtube video from TheZZAZZGlitch listing every way to die in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue and Red Rescue Team. (21 minutes)
In the spirit of the communal spoiler files of old, I enter the list of death causes here, in easy-to-search-for text. For the details, I refer you to the video. Note that every source of damage in the game that has the potential to reduce the player’s HP to zero has a corresponding entry in this list, so it serves as a map to every cause of harm in the game’s Pokeverse.
WAYS TO KICK THE POKEBUCKET (33 possible causes)
was defeated by (attacker)’s (move) (this is the most common cause of adventure ending) missed a Jump Kick and wiped out. missed a Hi Jump Kick and wiped out. fainted from the foe’s Destiny Bond. (an instadeath) fainted, covered in sludge. fainted from a move’s recoil damage. fainted from damage it took bouncing. was defeated by a foe’s pent-up energy. fainted from stepping on spikes. fainted from a bad burn. fainted, unable to bear constriction. fainted after the poison spread. fainted while still being wrapped. was felled by a curse. was drained to nothing by Leech Seed. fainted from hearing Perish Song. (another instadeath) fainted while in a nightmare. was felled by a thrown rock. fainted from hunger. disappeared in an explosion. tripped a Chestnut Trap and fainted. fell into a Pitfall Trap and fainted. was defeated by a Blast Seed’s damage. was transformed into an item. (instadeath) fainted from being knocked flying. was felled by a Pokemon sent flying. gave up the exploration. (quitting the game, not explicitly a death, but serves the same purpose) was blown out by an unseen force. (spent too long on a single floor and was expelled by the Winds of Kron) returned with the fallen partner. (your sidekick fainted, so you left too, automatically) fainted due to the weather. failed to protect the client Pokemon. (FISSION MAILED) fainted from a Wonder Orb. fainted from an item.
Unattainable but still used in the code, waiting for a moment that can never come (7 causes):
was transformed into a friend. (what?) left without being befriended. (hwat?) was defeated by debug damage. (nooo not debug damage) was felled by a thrown item. was deleted for the sake of an event. (oh okay then) went away. (so long) was possessed. (spooky)
Three messages exist in the code but with no way to activate them, even theoretically:
fainted from a debug attack. was defeated by a powerful move. fainted due to a trap’s damage.
Displaced Gamers is one of the best NES gaming channels on Youtube. They do sterling work diving into the very code of the games, to figure out what they are like they are. We link to nearly every video they do. Here’s a recap:
Well here’s another, and it actually is a follow-up to a video that I don’t think we linked to before. So here’s that video first, on Micronics’ port of Ghosts n’ Goblins to NES. (32 minutes)
Pretty long already, exquisitely geeky! Well its successor is even more geeky, as they actually reprogrammed the game to have a more optimized sprite engine. Although it’s a shorter video, at 24 minutes!
Ghost n’ Goblins is designed around being a 20fps game, so no amount of optimization will change that, it requires more substantial modification. But the time visualizations they use indicate that it may be possible to change that to 30fps, and with other changes 60fps may be possible. Mind you, the logic for the player, enemies and weapons all assume 20fps, so unless they’re changed to account moving to 60 frames per second will triple the speed of the game, so that obviously would need to be changed as well. I look forward to seeing the next chapter in this retrocoding saga.
Kosmic is a speedrunner who usually focuses on Super Mario Bros., but he’s reached the kill screen in Donkey Kong before. With some help, he’s figured out a way to complete that game’s “kill screen,” the point where it’s usually impossible to continue.
At Level 22 of Donkey Kong, there is a bug that causes the game to only give Mario (nèe Jumpman) 400 bonus timer points to complete the level. (The screen displays 4000, but that’s caused by a different glitch.) Playing normally, that’s not enough time to reach higher than the second girder on-screen.
However. If the player has Mario climb the first broken latter, then hold down for four frames then up for one, Mario will climb up off the top of it by one pixel. Continuing to do this, Mario can continue to ascend the screen. When he reaches Pauline’s height, the game will declare the level completed and move on to the next screen.
As it turns out, the bonus count on the Barrels screen is tied to the barrels that Donkey Kong throws, and the timing on those is somewhat random. If DK is slow at emitting those rolling obstacles, rarely, that will give Mario just enough time to reach Pauline at the top, and advance to the next level.
Doing this physically is essentially impossible. The player would have to waggle the joystick extremely quickly (and loudly), yet with the precise timing to consistently raise Mario’s position, to get him up the screen in time, and even if that worked, he’d still have to be lucky enough that Donkey Kong was slow at rolling barrels. But in emulation, with tool assistance, Kosmic managed to get to the top and finish the level. Then using other tricks and glitches, he managed to finish the next three levels (Elevators, Barrels again and Cement Factory) too, before his luck ran out at the next Barrels screen and he was unable to continue.
C.B. Brown is a Youtube maker who has a modest, but not huge, following. Three months ago he made a video about an interesting collection of obscure games, and I know just enough about them to know he’s got really good taste. If you’re looking for hidden gems to play, they’re an excellent place to look.
Here’s the collection, which first went up about three months ago and is 20 minutes long. It covers:
Gunpla: Gunman’s Proof, for Super Famicom, a comedy adventure set in the Old West with a strong vibe of A Link to the Past.
Game Freak’s Warriors Legend of the Blue Dragon: The Two Heroes, also for Super Famicom, which has a turn-based, side-view platforming combat system.
Konami’s Monster Maulers, an arcade game, a fighting game where most of your opponents aren’t the other characters but monstrous bosses.
The Violinist of Hamlin, for Super Famicom, a platformer based on a manga property where success depends on the clever use of your assistant/partner/sidekick Flute, who can be thrown around, used as a platform, or dressed up in animal costumes that give her extra abilities.
Samurai Kid, on Gameboy Color, an action-puzzle platformer with gameplay that involves turning enemies into useable blocks.
Willow for NES, Capcom’s semi-obscure action-RPG adaptation of George Lucas’ fantasy movie, with Zelda-like gameplay and unique screen-filling tile animation during fight scenes.
Dragon’s Revenge, a video pinball game on Genesis, a sequel to the TG16 game Devil Crush. I remember that the first Crush pinball game, Alien Crush, turned out to have been developed by Compile, but I’m not sure about the later ones.
Cocoron for Famicom, a platformer where you customize your character for each level by constructing them out of parts.
Top Hunter: Roddy & Cathy, for the Neo Geo, a platformer with plane switching (foreground and background) mechanics.
The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls, for Game Boy, which is semi-famous now for using the engine that would go on to be used for Link’s Awakening, and having characters that cameoed in that game. It has a non-interactive battle system where you and your opponent disappear into a fight cloud, and your health determines if you win.
A really unexpected entry, The Jetsons: Invasion of the Planet Pirates, for SNES, for being a solid platformer with some interesting ideas.
And Crusader of Centy, for Genesis, a Zelda-like where you team up with animals. As the video notes, it’s part of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pass, so if you have that it’s really easy to try out!
C.A. Brown recently made another video with more really solid recommendations in it, but let’s give that video its own focus, in a few days.
It is not my purpose here to steal any of his thunder, but rather, to give you a sense of whether you might want to click through and see what he has to say, and view the gameplay, which I think will give you a much better idea of whether his picks are worth it. A 20 minute video is a considerable investment of time, but he has helpfully marked his video with chapters and links to each game’s section, so it isn’t hard to navigate. Look and see.
