Tag: youtube

Retro Game Mechanics Explains Mario 3’s Minigames

Let’s get the video embed out of the way first. Pow!

Super Mario Bros. 3 has two significant minigames (outside of two-player mode), and the inner workings of both are explained in this video.

In most worlds there are “Space Panels,” which provide a slot machine minigame for extra lives. If you’ve ever tried them, you might have noticed that it’s extremely difficult to win anything at it. Well, the video explains why that is: there’s a significant random element to stopping the wheels. In particular, the last wheel has so much randomness in when it actually stops that it’s actually completely random what it’ll stop on! So much for timing!

I have a theory (which I explain in a comment on that video) that the slot machine game was made so random because of the quality of the reward (it’s possible to earn up to five extra lives at it), and because they had played around with life-granting minigames before. Doki Doki Panic, which got reskinned for overseas markets at Super Mario Bros. 2, has a slot machine game, “Bonus Chance,” that appears after every level. With good timing and practice Bonus Chance can be mastered, earning up to five extra lives for every coin plucked in the level. I have managed to abuse that game to earn so many extra lives that the game ran out of numbers for the tens’ digit of the life counter, sending it into letters of the alphabet. There’s certainly no danger of that in Super Mario Bros. 3.

The second minigame has the player match cards from a grid of 24. Each pair of cards found earns a modest prize, from as little as 10 coins up to a single extra life. Most of the awards are powerups for the player’s inventory. The player gets two tries, but if they don’t clear the board it’ll carry over to the next time they play. Attempts at the card matching board appear every 80,000 points the player earns, making it the only Super Mario game to actually reward scoring lots of points.

The card matching game is one of the most interesting minigames in all of the Mario series. There’s only eight layouts for the cards, the second and fifth cards of the middle row are frequently both the 1UP card, and the last three cards on the bottom row are always Mushroom, Flower and Star, in that order. This means the minigame can be mastered, and even if you don’t memorize all eight layouts to deduce where the prizes are, knowing the three cards that never change usually means it won’t take more than two or three attempts to clear the board, netting lots of powerups.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained looks into why the card matching game works the way it does, and discovered some interesting things. There’s actually code in the game to do a much more thorough randomization of the cards, but it goes unutilized. The full details are in the video, but in summary:

  • The board always begins in the same state,
  • the last three cards on the bottom row are left unchanged, probably on purpose,
  • the first way the other cards are scrambled shifts them one space in sequence, and is only done one or three times, three times in total,
  • and the other method of scrambling them, which involves swapping around three specific cards, is done exactly once between each shift.

The only variation in the steps is from the choice of whether to shift once or thrice, each of those three times. Thus, there are only 23 possible layouts, that is, 8. There is a loop in there to potentially vary the number of times the cards are swapped (the second way to scramble the cards), but the way it’s written the loop is never used, and the cards are swapped only once each time.

All of the layouts for Maro 3’s card matching minigame, from the Nintendo Power guide. “The key is concentration” alludes to the traditional card game “Concentration,” which is played in a similar manner.

What I also find interesting is, this isn’t the only Nintendo to use a minigame that involves mixing up hidden prizes. Kid Icarus’ Treasure Rooms also have a limited number of layouts, which vary for each of the game’s three worlds. The player can open pots in the room to collect minor items, but if they open the wrong pot early, before opening all the others, they find the God of Poverty, and lose everything they’ve found. If they can save that pot for last, though, the final pot will instead contain a pretty good prize, which can even be a Credit Card item that cannot be obtained otherwise.

The way they’re designed, both Mario 3’s card-matching game and Kid Icarus’s Treasure Rooms have tells, specific spots that can be revealed to identify which of the limited number of boards that version of the game is using, and that the player can use to get all the prizes. Also, there are Nintendo-published guides that reveal all the layouts, in Nintendo Power for Kid Icarus (recounted on this charmingly old-school webpage), and the Nintendo Power guide for Super Mario Bros. 3 (on page 10), so Nintendo had to have been aware of the limited nature of the board layouts, and may have actually intended them to be defeated with a good strategy.

SMB3 Roulette & Card Matching Games Explained (Youtube, 20 minutes)

Basement Brothers Xanatalks About Xanadu

Falcom is possibly the greatest Japanese game publisher that’s barely known in the US. Recently Ys sequels have changed this a bit, but their earlier titles are still a hole in the knowledge of even some Western RPG fanatics. At least, I never had much of a chance to learn about them, other than through Hardcore Gaming 101’s as-usual excellent descriptions of the Dragon Slayer series.

Xanadu is a Dragon Slayer game. It’s actually Dragon Slayer II, but it plays nothing like the original. Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family, is one of the very few Dragon Slayer titles to get a release over the geographic and cultural divide, as Legacy of the Wizard on NES. It doesn’t play like the other games either. It was a tradition to make every Dragon Slayer game play very unlike the others. The way I see it, the series was as much about coming up with a new system to explore and master as it was about having new scenarios and locations.

Xanadu is also a ridiculously obtuse game, which is in keeping with the original. Lots of the Dragon Slayer line expected you to do obtuse things, things not explained to you, to proceed. I’ve played through Legacy of the Wizard, and can verify that it was hard, but compared to Xanadu it seems like a model of straightforward play. In Xanadu, right near the start, there is a place where you fall down a hole, walk left five steps, then double-back right to scroll a secret shop onto the screen, the only place in the entire game where you can buy and sell magic items. Its inventory system doesn’t use words, it’s just a sequence of numbers, indicating quantities, and you’re just supposed to know the order of the items they represent.

Xanadu, like some other prominent RPGs, is secretly about resource management. Each monster you find on the world map screens (which are side-view!) can only be defeated and looted a limited number of times. If you run them out, and are left without the items needed to finish the game, you’re just stuck. You can also get stuck in some areas if you just move the wrong direction. You can save and load the game, but doing so carries costs in gold pieces! The only way to escape this temporal-economic trap is to make a backup of your game disk, and restore your copy from it. I like this idea, I’ve always found the grind-until-you-win nature of many present-day RPGs a bit unappealing. I kind of wish more games now would take inspiration from some of these early efforts, where each game could have a radically different play style, and require the player apply some real strategy to win, but maybe without being quite so user-hostile.

Youtube channel Basement Brothers made a nice retrospective of Xanadu, and managed to complete the whole game, although by following a video walkthrough. It’s an essential window into a whole universe of RPGs we were denied at the time.

Xanadu (PC-88 Paradise) Falcom’s original classic, and Japan’s must-have 8-bit action RPG of 1985 (Youtube, 39 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Very Short Pizza Tower Cartoon

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

This is a very short animation with a couple of Pizza Tower characters. It’s a mere triffle, and the joke’s pretty silly,but it’s spot on, of the game’s style, and in the appearance of an early 90s cartoon show, of the type that the game’s animation itself seeks to emulate. It’s gotten an absurd number of views, like nearly half a million, in six days. Now, maybe it will get a few more.

“Four feet! Get it? Get it??”

Pizza Tower Cartoon (Youtube, 25 seconds)

Sundry Sunday: Snailchan Adventure

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

Under the category of lushly-produced silly game-related things, from four years ago, there’s Snailchan’s Adventure. It’s not very serious at all, but it’s a fun use of four minutes of your time. The comments mention that there was an actual game based on this animation planned, but I’m not aware of anything having ever come of it. Still, this is nice in and of and by and through itself. I don’t know if it actually was on Newgrounds at some point, but it seems like exactly the kind of thing that would have been featured there at some point, and it was right after a bit of exploration there that Youtube’s recommendation algorithm decided to show it to me, so it probably had been there, in the past-past.

The Lost Sound Code of Sinistar

Sinistar was a game that had quite an impressive sound design. It borrowed a bunch of its sound effects from earlier Williams games, with which it shared common hardware that was originally design for pinball machines. A cockpit version of Sinistar, of which only around 200 units were made, was the first arcade game to have stereo sound. And of course all versions of the game have the Sinistar’s famous digitized threats and taunts.

While Sinistar’s main program source code was found and made available on Github, the source of the code that drove its sound hardware has long been lost. Youtube user SynaMax has done the best he could at recreating that code, and has made a video talking about the process, the sound design of Sinistar and other early Williams games, and even found unused sounds in the code.

Contained within the code is the revelation that the sound chip that drove the rear speakers in the cockpit version ran slightly different code than contained within the main sound ROM. The data from that version of the game was only dumped this year, meaning that the game running in MAME was somewhat incorrect.

Now that the right version of the chip has been dumped, the cockpit version of Sinistar now sounds properly in MAME. Although this does mean that users running up-to-date MAME have to refresh their romset for this version of the game. Such are the tradeoffs of MAME emulation.

Another revelation of the video was that the parametric sound generators used by Williams arcade games from that time often produced interesting noises if it was fed with random data. Sound programmers sought out different sets of numbers to give them, including by asking passers-by for numbers off the top of their heads and garbage values found in RAM when dev systems were powered up, in order to produce strange sound effects.

Devs using more recent parametric generators like bfxr, LabChrip, ChipTone, sfxia, rFXGen, wafxr and jfxr can produce noises by similar means using those programs’ Mutate or Randomize buttons!

I feel like I should warn however, near the end of the video is mention of a bit of drama concerning the MAME developers, in getting code supporting the change integrated into the software. I’m not weighing in on this, not the least reason being I don’t know enough about it. But I feel like you should know it’s coming, ahead of time, before embarking on the 51-minute journey.

Rescuing the Lost Code and Stereo Sound to Sinistar (Youtube, 51 minutes)

U Can Beat Video Games Tackles Super Metroid

It’s yet another Youtube video post, but the subject is pretty notable, U Can Beat Video Games at last tackling the highlight of the Metroid series, Super Metroid for SNES, in an epic-length episode. Often big games get split up into multiple parts, but this time the whole game is covered at once. These videos can’t be easy to put together, and I appreciate the effort that goes into them!

As usual UCBVG covers the entire game, including all items and known cheats, and alternate endings. If you’ve ever wondered why GDQ players, hosts and audience ever shout “Kill the animals” or “Save the animals,” the ending to this video should fill in the blanks to an acceptable degree.

U Can Beat Video Games: Super Metroid (3 hours 37 minutes)

PatmanQC on Atari’s Escape From the Planet of the Robot Monsters

Escape From the Plant of the Robot Monsters (I’m just going to call it Escape Etc. from here) is a game I’ve always been curious about.

It’s weird to think now about the time frame of Atari arcade games. 1972 saw Pong; 1979 was Asteroids, signalling a new direction for Atari in arcades; 1984 was Marble Madness, their first post-crash hit; then, 1991 was Street Fighter II and the start of the fighting game craze, forcing Atari to change direction yet again. They would have some hits from there (like Primal Rage and Area 51), but nothing with real cultural staying power until the era of Gauntlet Legends and San Francisco Rush.

Escape Etc. I don’t think did badly, but it wasn’t a huge hit. You can kind of get an idea of the popularity of one of Atari’s arcade games by how many ports it got. APB, for example, Dave Theurer’s last game at Atari, only got Lynx and European home computer ports, while Rampart (John Salwitz and Dave Ralston’s last game, if we’re noting such things) got a ton of ports to lots of platforms. Escape Etc. didn’t even get a Lynx port, although one had been planned.

This isn’t an Arcade Mermaid post, just another link to a Youtube video review. It’s done in an old style, without a lot of flash, but there’s good things about that too, and the information is both interesting and thorough.

More information on Escape Etc. can be found in this post from Vintage Arcade Gal. It’s text!

The History of Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters – Arcade documentary (Youtube, 27 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)