Tag: youtube

St1ka Points Out Neglected 8-Bit Games

St1ka is an interesting Youtuber from Portugal who often covers the Brazilian gaming beats. I should link to him more often when he does videos on his standard beat, as the gaming scenes outside of the US, Europe and Japan don’t get nearly as much exposure as they should.

This time though he is looking at retro gaming with a more general focus, pointing out interesting titles from decades past. They’re not making nearly as many 8-bit titles as they used to, so finding a cool old game you’ve never tried is almost as good as if they were making them now!

The games covered are:

  • Konami’s Getsu Fuuma Den, Japanese horror for the Famicom,
  • Rod Land, a single-screen arcade platformer with a good Famicom port,
  • Kickmaster, a deep combat action game for the NES,
  • Lunar: Walking School for Game Gear, a Game Arts-produced spinoff JRPG of the main Lunar series that doesn’t have much to do with its origin, and has a happy slice-of-life anime feel,
  • Psychic World for the Sega Master System, a neglected platformer where you pick up magic-like powers as you progress, which got a Game Gear port with unexpected differences, and both deriving from a Japan-only MSX version with its own differences,
  • Power Blade and Power Blade 2 for the NES, and the Japanese version of the first one, Power Blazer, stylish action platformers akin to Mega Man, but staring an Arnold Schwarzenegger clone who wields boomerangs, except in Japan where you play as a serious-looking little kid,
  • Cave Noire, a roguelite game for Game Boy that I’ve written about in the past, and personally vouch for,
  • Daikatana for Game Boy Color, a 2D and rather improved version of the infamous 3D PC game,
  • Power Strike II for the SMS, or its Game Gear remake that’s completely different, but they’re Compile shooters so you know they’re going to be awesome, and really you can’t go wrong with any Power Strike/Aleste game, or ZANAC or The Guardian Legend on NES come to mention it,
  • Queen Fighters 2000, a bootleg game for Gameboy Color that outright cribs the style from Gals Fighter for NeoGeo Pocket Color, but also includes a bunch of random characters from other properties for the hell of it, since being a bootleg game anyway why not,
  • Aliens Neoplasma is a 2019 release for the Spectrum that makes excellent use of that system’s graphical quirks to increase the game’s atmosphere,
  • the action RPG Dark Arms for the NeoGeo Pocket Color,
  • early survival RPG Survival Kids for the Game Boy Color,
  • Phantis, a cross-genre sci-fi game for the Spectrum,
  • Shatterhand for the NES, which feels inspired by Batman on the same system, and
  • Kabuki Quantum Fighter, also for the NES, which also seems inspired by Batman in its play style, and was also developed by Hal Laboratory.

INCREDIBLE 8-BIT Hidden Gems You Never Played (Youtube, 41 minutes)

Fumble Dimension: Breaking 1,000 Points in Madden 22

It’s been about five months since we looked back at Jon Bois’ Breaking Madden’s Super Bowl game where they set one team up to maximum stats, the other team at minimum stats, and just ran up the score. They found out that Madden 2013 stopped counting score at 255 points. Counting manually, at around 1,500 the game called a penalty on a play that wasn’t run, and the instant replay presented the most frightening image a sports video game has ever generated, the Football Fetus:

Soak that one up for your nightmares.

They stored a team’s score in a single byte in 2013! It was a striking example of how EA Sports, without competition for decades, basically views Madden as a no-effort money printer. Licensed NFL football is either Madden or nothing. What are you going to do, play with no-namers? Pshaw!

Breaking Madden is like ten years old now, and the rights situation hasn’t changed. EA Sports continues to squat possessively on its golden football egg, with no end in sight. But Breaking Madden made some internet waves in the time since. Maybe they’ve gotten their development act together? Maybe?

In the time since then SBNation has switched these kinds of things that they do to Youtube videos, and rebranded them as Secret Base. Jon Bois has become quite the Youtube sensation there in the time since, making a lot of very well-regarded internet documentaries.

One of the Secret Base subseries is called the Fumble Dimension, which is a similar kind of attempt to break sports video games, just in video. About 11 months ago they (mostly Jon’s associate Kofie) again took a hammer to the most recent Madden, 22 at that point, and tried to run up the scoreboard. This time though they did themselves. No, they didn’t try to win against an inferior team. They played a team to lose, against a team set at maximum AI, and tried to let the computer score as much as possible. Here it is (23 minutes).

The good news is, the score no longer ceases to count after 255 points. The score is free to rise up over 1,000. The game’s final score broke 1,700, and didn’t break 2,000 only because Kofie was feeling hugely bored playing terribly on purpose for play after excruciating play. They theorize that 7,000 may well be popular with optimal sub-optimal performance, but they leave that demazing feat to some other intrepid failure.

But while they have wisely decided to store player scores in more than one byte now, there were several other hints that Madden 22 is just as haphazardly constructed as Madden 13 was. Players would try to run off the field, held back only by the walls of the stadium. The announcers announced a lengthening series of safeties each as the “second safety of the game.” And while the score counted correctly, an assortment of player stats were scored increasingly inaccurately as the self-induced drubbing continued, some dipping into the negative as they grew, a sure sign of uncapped signed values.

When I posted on Breaking Madden, I took the opportunity to diatribize about the decay of the Madden games, and how the series should either be given renewed resources or the license just be allowed to pass to other hands. I won’t bore you with yet more harping on the point now, I’ll just say, please NFL, hand your license over to someone who actually seems to care.

Fumble Dimension: We tried to break the Madden scoreboard (Youtube, 23 minutes)

Folding Ideas: Why It’s Rude To Suck At World of Warcraft

Another another video again once more! And this is a big one. Dan Olson of Folding Ideas tends to post long-form, movie-length videos on its subjects. They were the toast of the internet for a while after their brutal takedown of NFTs and cryptocurrencies (2h 18m), which was recently followed up by an equally detonative look at NFT-based libertarian techbro virtual world Decentraland (1h 49m-I told you they were long).

Between those two worthy video conflagrations they produced a video that is rather in our backyard, a one hour, 24 minute vid-essay on who World of Warcraft became a place where playing sub-optimally isn’t just frowned upon, but came to be seen as anti-social. If you’re interested in the social aspects of MMORPGs, It’s worth devoting an eleventh of a day’s waking hours to!

What’s really interesting here is something I’ve been worried about with older video and computer games for a while. Games that manage to still be popular over a lot period get focused on, dissected, sometimes disassembled, and laid out so that they have no secrets. Their audience both focuses on them, and both seeks out ways to play them better, and reasons to play them better.

That’s where speedrunning comes from, and that’s the thing-what’s happening in WoW is just what’s happening to classic gaming in general. It’s become a degraded form of play, almost, to come to a game completely new. I’ve bought into this too, occasionally leaving a message on a Youtube video of someone playing sub-optimally giving a couple of helpful tips. Really though there’s no need. If they wanted to do that, the avenues are available to them. There’s already plenty of people trying to play, say, Castlevania III in the best possible way.

World of Warcraft is 19 years old now, and even has an entire official alternate version that duplicates the game experience from launch. During that time the expert-level strategies that were discovered by players after long observation and practice have become ubiquitous lore. Even if you’ve never read a FAQ or watched a tutorial video, just from hearing other players talk about the game and watching them, a lot of it will seep in.

As a result, not only can’t a long-time player go back to how they experienced the game at launch, because they know too much, but even new players can’t, because the community around them is filled by those players who know that much.

There’s lots to think about here. Especially if you’ve played World of Warcraft before, but also if you haven’t. (I haven’t!) Also note that the video is consciously patterned after Jon Bois’s videos for SBNation and Secret Base. Here in 2023, that’s a comforting reference.

Why It’s Rude To Suck At Warcraft (Youtube, 1h24m)

PannenKoek2012 Returns: Crashing Super Mario 64 With Pendulums

PannenKoel2012 is the Super Mario 64 enthusiast (that’s the only word I can think of that matches) who has been working on reducing the number of A button presses needed to finish the game. They haven’t gotten it down to zero yet, and likely never will, but by resorting to increasingly extreme measures they continue to figure out ways to get it down. I think they’ve been working at this project for over 12 years; the oldest video on their Youtube account is that old.

Of arguably more interest than their quest, though, is its interesting byproducts, which is a series of Youtube videos, on both their main channel and alternate channel UncommentatedPannen, which not only explain how their many subtle and effective stratagems work, but also a number of aspects of how Super Mario 64’s engine works, and even basic principles of computer science. These videos are so in-depth that they have their own wiki to track the concepts they use, to explain turns like Parallel Universe (PU) and Pedro Spot.

When I say they return, it’s not that they ever left, but it’d been a while since they had a solid explainer. Now they have one, it has spoken narration instead of the text that marks many of the best videos, and the production values have even increased a bit:

In this video, a clever way to manipulate the pendulums in Tick Tock Clock to crash the game after 39 1/2 days of playing also takes into its sweep an excellent explanation of many of the systems compilers use to represent numbers and their limitations.

And here are a number of those interesting videos (by no means complete) that they’ve posted in the past: The Art of Cloning (17m29s) – Walls, Floors and Ceilings parts One (37m23s), Two (32m5s) and Three (37m26s, all three together being a pretty through explanation of how Mario 64’s platforming system works) – Blinking (eyes, 8m40s) – Floats (9m23s) – Pause Buffering (8m7s) – Pitch Conversation and Yaw Velocity Conservation (15m15s) – Sleeping (Mario, 7m25s) – Random Number Generation (12m37s) – Wall Hitboxes (6m50s) – Releasing Objects (5m18s) – How Holding Objects Really Works (12m1s) – Units, Speed and Sense of Scale (4m41s)

How to Crash SM64 Using a Pendulum (Youtube, one hour 12 minutes)

Set Side B Changes Formats!

I’m thrilled to announce that today marks the beginning of big news for Set Side B. We’re switching our theme! We’re no longer providing the most eclectic and interesting of retro, indie and niche gaming information. No, starting on this auspicious day we’re going to all old websites and ancient meme videos!

We’re talking zombo.com! We’ve got YTMND! The Onion! I Can Has Cheezburger! Know Your Meme!

You like wikis? Have you heard of Everything2, or The Earth Edition of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? I hear there is also another upstart wiki-based knowledge site out there somewhere, we look forward to the day when it’s nearly as content-packed as E2 or H2G2.

Remember Slashdot? Remember Digg? I mean the Digg after the Digg that succeeded Digg! Have you been to Fark lately? How about MetaFilter? For some reason I’m still there! The twin fonts of news, Salon and Slate! Liberal infozones Dailykos and Talking Points Memo, they still exist, thumbing their noses at ennui and entropy!

Project Gutenberg is still gamely trying to give away a trillion ebooks! Snopes debunks all the worst misinformation out there, and Cecil Adams’ The Straight Dope column stopped running, but seems to be now running again, and new columns debut on their message boards! And the Internet Archive, in particular their Wayback Machine, is an essential tool for any thinking netizen, and I hear they could really use your support!

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency still brings a droll sort of funny. The IMDB may be owned by Amazon now, but you can still get a ton of information on nearly every form of visual media there. Rotten Tomatoes still aggregates movie reviews from critics and viewers alike.

Game stuff? GameFAQs, although owned by Gamespot, is still around, and StrategyWiki is the good version of what Fandom ruthlessly exploits. The Cutting Room Floor provides info and esoterica on hundreds of games!

There are webcomics too! Let’s see. XKCD, Argon Zark, Dork Tower, Order of the Stick, Penny Arcade, PvP, Bob the Angry Flower, Girl Genius, Megatokyo and The Perry Bible Fellowship! Also Maakies and Red Meat (although they’re a tad edgier, and Makkies is sometimes NSFW).

We hope you’ve enjoyed this April Fool’s Day post! Happy thoughts! It’s intended as a real and useful post and certainly isn’t just an excuse to write whatever I wanted today!

But pleaase remember: the internet isn’t forever. The sites you love now won’t always be around. Ask me about Suck.com, Plastic, or the Brunching Shuttlecocks someday. But not today, I’ve got this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side.

Have a few ancient Youtube videos from our voluminous files! (Yes, we keep files of cool Youtube videos. We’re awesome that way.)

That should be enough for now. Gotta keep some of it in reserve. For later….

Chrontendo 61!

Does it seem to you like there’s been a lot of Youtube videos here lately? It’s an unfortunate fact that a lot of the information and articles that once would have been in informative and quick-reading blog posts are now presented to the internet in a format that requires video editing software to create and 15+ minutes of your time to watch.

However, with Chrontendo it’s worth it. Dr. Sparkle’s epic-length tour through the entire run of the Famicom’s and NES’s libraries. Most episodes are an hour or longer, but you definitely get your time’s worth by watching them. And like U Can Beat Video Games, it’s nice just to have running in the background while you do other things.

We linked to Chrontendo #60 last June, titled “The Most Perverted Episode.” Sadly Chrontendo #61 doesn’t come with any titillation factor; it’s title is “Not really worth the wait.” It’s a series of games ranging from pretty bland to outright terrible. Covered are the months of May and June 1990, plus one game that’s a holdover from April. Within the video is footage and commentary on:

  • Castle Quest, which is not the same game as Castlequest in the U.S., which was a renamed localization of a game called Castle Excellent in Japan. It’s a turn-based strategy game that’s like Chess against a computer opponent, but with a random factor.
  • Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished: The Final Chapter, which isn’t so bad, but was greatly overshadowed by the must more impressive Turbografx CD version released around the same time.
  • Baken Hissou Gaku: Gate In, yet another horse racing sim, this one with an extremely bland presentation.
  • Jajamaru Gekimaden: Maboroshi no Kinmajou, a so-so ninja adventure/Zelda clone.
  • Snake’s Revenge, the disowned sequel to Metal Gear that Hideo Kojima didn’t work on, a game that some people like but Dr. Sparkle doesn’t. I’ll say it’s more polished than NES Metal Gear, at least.
  • Remote Control, a video version of a nearly forgotten MTV game show that couldn’t use any of the celebrity likenesses from the show.
  • Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, another of the Disney Afternoon tie-in games. Dr. Sparkle admits it’s not bad, and it’s probably the best game of the episode, but is only really interesting when played co-op with two players. There’s a fairly scandalous piece of Gadget fanart here, scavenged from the aptly-named halls of DeviantArt.
  • Rally Bike, a port of a Taito arcade motorcycle game with much less polish than the original. I note that this game was ported by one of my un-favorite developers, Visco.
  • Battle Fleet, another turn-based strategy game, with a naval theme.
  • And S.C.A.T.: Special Cybernetic Attack Team, a game that plays a bit like Capcom’s Forgotten Worlds, but without that game’s hallucinatory visuals.

Chrontendo #61 (Youtube, 1 hour and 1 minute) – archives – previously

A Steam Store Page Review of Elven Warmaiden

On each episode of Indie Inquiries, we review an indie game store page and provide marketing advice for how to best present your game. For this episode we looked at Elven Warmaiden. If you would like me to look at your game in the future, please reach out.

Arcade Gradius II Compared to PC Engine CD Version

These days, if you’re playing a game with multiple versions, there’s usually one specific version you want. For pre-Crash games, if there’s an arcade version, most of the time, it’s the one you want. After the Crash it becomes less definite. Super Mario Bros. at home is a much more playable game that the arcade version. Vs. Super Mario Bros., which is hungry for those quarters. For games like Smash T.V. though you still usually want to play the arcade version.

The arcade and PC Engine CD version of Gradius II though are a much closer call. In a couple of places this home version is actually slightly better, or slightly harder, than the arcade original. It also contains an extra level that’s missing from the arcade.

Inglebard Gaming on Youtube has played through both games entirely and shows them to you side by side, so you can decide for yourself!

Gradius II Arcade vs PC Engine Super CD (Youtube)

Now, on the Sharp X68000

The SuperGrafx is a failed system that had only five games, only three of which seem to be worth playing. The Sharp X68000 series of high-end personal computers, which were only released in Japan, on the other hand, is probably the popular gaming system Westerners have heard the least about.

As I said yesterday, the X68000 cost three grand, and that was just for the base system. If you thought the NeoGeo was expensive, hah. It’s price was justified in that it was a computer, indeed a workstation, and had a variety of software other than games. But it did still have a lot of games, including some of the best arcade conversions, including excellent ports of Rygar, After Burner, Strider, Final Fight, Street Fighter II and Detana! Twinbee, and a well-remembered recreation of the original Castlevania up to then-current aural and visual ideals. The X68000 even got conversions of Atari arcade games like Marble Madness, and even KLAX, that would I would have loved to have played back then.

The X68000 also worked a lot like a MS-DOS machine from the time. It ran mostly HUMAN68K as its OS, a DOS clone made by HudsonSoft, although it also had windowing OSes. Despite how it seemed in use though, it used Motorola 680X0-family processors, like original iteration of the Macintosh. But while it has a DOS-style OS, it’s a home computer with a dedicated sprite chip!

At times it feels like this blog is a recap of my gaming-related Youtube explorations, but I have no qualms about it when they’re as excellent as the two I have this time. One is a review of the “pro” version system from four years ago, from someone who went and obtained one:

Three years later, RMC returned with a more thorough exploration of a different machine of the line:

And this one is about emulating it, which is probably the closest most of us will ever come to trying out any of its software:

On the SuperGrafx

What is the SuperGrafx? Why don’t we remember it as well as its predecessor, the PC Engine/TurboGrafx 16, with which it was backwards compatible?

Sharopolis on Youtube digs into the system and its capabilities (17 minutes):

As you can tell by the video’s cover image: Amazing Power, No games. The SuperGrafx only had five games released for it throughout its lifetime, pretty harsh for a system that cost around $300 by today’s money. That cost, relative to that of the PC Engine CD, which was also expensive but could play CD games with vastly greater storage, was probably what doomed it. For those really seeking an arcade experience in Japan there was the Sharp x68000, famous at the time as the true enthusiast’s system with a good number of nearly exact arcade ports. It also cost around $6,000 in today’s money, and still $3,000 in then-money.

The system used the same chip as the PC Engine before it, a 6502 variant running at 7 mHz, meaning it was only a 8-bit system. But was that really so bad? The major 16-bit competition for it was the Motorola 68000, another venerable chip at the time that was used in the original Apple Mac, the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. Yet the 68000 also had some more overhead. Many instructions on the 6502 completed in from two to four cycles, whereas the minimum cycle count of a 68000 instruction was four, with some taking up to 20. This, of course, is offset by the 68000’s greater number of registers and ability to work with two bytes at once for many instructions.

Its graphics were essentially two of the PC Engine’s graphics chip, with some circuitry to interface their outputs together. This description brings uncomfortable reminders of people deriding the Wii’s graphics as “two Gamecubes taped together,” but it’s a much closer description of the SuperGrafx’s graphics. But in practice this meant twice the sprites, dual-plane backgrounds, and double the potential colors on-screen at once, while the MegaDrive/Genesis infamously was still stuck with 64.

The SuperGrafx’s failure in the market was one of those inflection points of the growth of video gaming. If it had succeeded then NEC might still be a player in gaming today, and maybe Hudson Soft would still be an independent entity, instead of just another property for Konami to mine for nostalgiabucks.