Tag: youtube

Investigating Bootleg Battletoads

The Youtube channel of chirinea mostly hosts cover songs, but they just posted an interesting short video (about 13 minutes), both explaining the Brazilian NES game scene and figuring out why the author’s Battletoads cart skips level 2.

During much of the NES’s life, Nintendo has no distribution deal to release consoles or games in Brazil, leaving the market open for a legion of bootleg cartridge manufacturers. The video author had some of these games, which were usually straight dumps of the originals, but their version of Battletoads was not.

It had been slightly localized, with its intro text translated into Portuguese. But there were some other minor changes too. Players started with an extra life, and had infinite continues. But also, for an unknown reason, the game completely skipped the second level, the one right before the game’s infamous Turbo Tunnel.

Was it a change in the game’s code, or a malfunction caused by his NES hardware? chirinea had a bit of an adventure in figuring out how to get the code off of his cartridge into an emulator so it could be compared with the official release, and ultimately found out that yes, the code was different, and it was probably done to avoid problems with Brazilian bootleg NESes crashing on level two.

It’s an interesting journey, and worth the fairly brief runtime to find out how he did it.

What’s wrong with this Brazilian bootleg Battletoads? (Youtube, 13 minutes)

EDIT: Pronoiac offers this logo for the post and video, from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Logo Generator! You see, the internet is still full of things!

AGDQ 2023 Selections #2: Tuesday & Wednesday

Some more selections possibly of interest from AGDQ 2023. Note that times given in the text are not the length of the run, but as according to our usual policy the run length of the video itself.

Ape Escape 2 (1:04):

Goat Simulator (34m):

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Any% No 0HP race (42m) – at 19:40 in begins an extra Julius Any% run:

Super Mario Galaxy 2 four-player Any% race (3:27):

Jak II Any% (1:19):

Outer Wilds (53m):

Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal (1:35):

FEZ (35m):

Stardew Valley (58m):

Pokemon Yellow (2:24):

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (48m):

Stray (1:16):

Sundry Sunday: Commercial for Atari Mario Bros.

We love weird old game commercials from before (or in this case during) the crash, before games and game ads began skew quite so much towards the stereotypical tastes of teenage males, and before companies like Nintendo became such jealous guardians of their products.

And just look at all the effort that must have gone into this commercial! This isn’t just people sitting in front of a TV raving about a game, these actors are wearing costumes and running from puppet creatures on an actual set! And this may well be the first human actor to ever portray Luigi in front of a camera (he may look like Mario with his color scheme, but his hat says Luigi, and he’s calling Mario for help). It even calls back to the theme song of Car 54 Where Are You. It’s a shame that the game couldn’t possibly have moved enough units to justify this production.

AGDQ 2023 Selections #1: Sunday and Monday

I didn’t get to watch AGDQ realtime this year, but here are some selected videos from the first two days that might be interesting….

Splatoon 3 Any% led off the show (1 hour 30 minutes):

Followed by Breath of the Wild Any% in 29 minutes, always a crowd pleaser:

Symphony of the Night All Bosses on the Xbox 360 version:

Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition Enhanced, Any% Unrestricted (1:47):

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky Randomizer, 10 Dungeon Blitz (1:03)Ax Battler: A Legend of Golden Axe:

Ax Battler: A Legend of Golden Axe 100% on Game Gear (29m):

Bomberman 64: The Second Attack Any% (37m):

Superliminal All Collectables (51m):

Shovel Knight Dig Any% Race (45m):

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge Co-op 2v2 Any% Arcade Chill Race (that was a mouthful, 1:25):

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales Any % (2:50):

and Fable Anniversary (1:32):

We’ll pull out a few more next week!

Sundry Sunday: PAC-TOM

suckerpinch, a.k.a. Tom7, is a regular presenter at SIGBOVIK and no stranger to the intelligent-but-fun video presentation field. This isn’t the first time we’ve posted his work here, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

Previously he’s run automated tournaments of extremely stupid chess-playing algorithms, wrote programs to try to learn to play NES games by watching memory, and tried to generalize the idea of uppercase and lowercase letters in order to make hypothetical letters that are more uppercase and more lowercase. Among other things.

This time he tells us of the culmination of a sixteen year project to walk down every street in Pittsburgh. Come for that, stay for the moving Pac-Man costume he makes for himself at the end!

How I Ran the Length of Every Street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM (Youtube, 32 minutes)

Masahiro Sakurai talks about Kirby Air Ride

Just about everyone respects Masahiro Sakurai! I’m no different! He’s made some wonderful games, and even his more obscure works are really cool and fun!

I’ve linked to his series on game design before, released on Youtube with Nintendo’s help. It’s really popular! We try not to link too frequently to the same series or blog, instead waiting to find something in it that connects with me personally, in the hopes that whatever it is will be something that connects with my readers as well, and that’s why I’m linking to him talking a bit about Kirby Air Ride.


Like The Speed Rumbler, I feel like I have to say something really specific and detailed about KAR. (What a cool and appropriate acronym, both in the context of Kirby and Speed Rumbler!) Especially City Trial, which I think is just waiting for some interested party to revisit an expand. In the meantime though, enjoy Sakurai talking about what may be the most unique Kirby game, even in a series containing Star Stacker, Pinball Land and Tilt ‘n Tumble.

Masahiro Sakurai on Creating Games: Kirby Air Ride (Youtube, 7 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: The “Music” of Crazy Bus

Remember Crazy Taxi? How they got licensed punk music from Bad Religion and The Offspring for it? Remember how awesome that was? I’m not even a music person mostly, but I could still recognize that the soundtrack of those games was special. (I’m talking about the arcade and Dreamcast versions-other versions may or may not have that soundtrack, probably due to licensing issues.)

You want to know what game doesn’t have a great sound track? Crazy Bus.

Crazy Bus is a homebrew Sega Genesis/Mega Drive game that was created as a test for the programmer’s BASIC compiler. It wasn’t meant to be a real game. As a result, its soundtrack is almost a masterpiece in cacaphony. Listen for yourself… but you’re going to want to turn the volume down for this one.

It’s awe-ful-some. I encourage you to play it for for friends, family, co-workers, prospective employers, random strangers and household pets. I’m certain nothing bad will come of it!

A Non-Invasive Gameboy HDMI Adaptor

This one’s crazy. The Gameboy does not have external video output. In order to get its display to appear on a screen other than its built in LCD dox matrix, you absolutely have to at least crack open the case. Don’t you?

Well, actually, yes, if you always want a perfect image. Sebastian Staacks (an awesome name) figured out a way to do it that mostly works. It’s a cartridge that goes into the Gameboy, that itself has a slot into which you plug the cartridge that you wish to play. Simple, right?

No, no, wait. There’s a problem. The Gameboy doesn’t expose its video through the cartridge port. There is no pin leading out providing a video signal that can be converted for display. There’s no way this could work!

Well, there is a way, kind of. The device contains a Raspberry Pi that runs its own Gameboy emulator, that it tries to keep synced with the version running on physical hardware. It does this by watching bus activity exposed to it through the cartridge port!

But while there’s a lot that it can do with this information, there’s also a lot it can’t see. It can’t, for example, see directly what buttons are being pressed. However, by watching how the cartridge reads the cart ROM, it can deduce what inputs were pressed.

The process is not perfect. While it can spy some memory accesses, a few things escape its inspection. While it can recreate the layout of the starting blocks in Tetris Game B, it can’t catch their randomized appearances. Also, while a Raspberry Pi is much faster than a Gameboy, it’s not fast enough to carry out its display in the same frame as the main unit, so it lags behind a couple of frames. Still though, it’s a very clever idea, and it’s amazing that it works as well as it does!

Sebastian made a Youtube video explaining and showing off his work, here. (It’s the same one embedded above.)

There Oughta Be A Game Boy Capture Cartridge

Sundry Sunday: Animal World Soccer

Oh no! As a New Year’s Day “treat,” today’s weird game video is Animal World Soccer! Despair and dismay!

A “game” for the Playstation 2, this amazingly cheap production has no Soccer-based play. Instead, it’s a collection of simple puzzles and activities bundled along with a 43-minute video file of some of the worst animation that this spectator has ever seen, and I’ve seen Paddy the Pelican!

How and why this was made is unknown to me. It’s an inexplicable artifact of an unknown process. Why is the entire video under-laid with that tension-filled drumbeat? Why are character designs so inconsistent? Why does it look like they outright stole the designs for Simba and Mufasa from The Lion King for their lions? Why do some animals go about on all-fours while others stand upright and wear clothes? None of these questions are answered. None of these questions have answers! You see folks, they just didn’t care.

Okay, there is a bit of an explanation….

This animation was produced by a company called Dingo Pictures. The game, which Destructoid called “the worst game ever made,” (which is a big claim, there’s lots of awful games), was produced by Phoenix Games, which only distributed to the European market.

There is certainly more to this story. But I can’t bring myself to dig into it.

Jeremy Parish’s Segaiden Reaches the Master System Era

I worry that he’ll never finish his many Youtube game history projects, but Jeremy Parish has hit an important milestore as Segaiden, his Sega-specific series, reaches the beginning of the Master System era! In addition to the console itself three games are covered this time, including the pack-in that’s so packed-in that it’s included on the system’s circuit board itself.

There’s no shortage of game history videos out there, but Jeremy’s work is among the best, tieing the other collection of relentlessly-complete game cataloging projects, Dr. Sparkle’s Chrontendo, Chronsega and Chronturbo. I find that neither Jeremy nor Sparkle’s projects replace the other, but instead look at their subjects from different angles. Jeremy Parish has more of a view of context, both from other games and history, while the various Chrons look directly at each game’s play.

But importantly, neither of them succumb to the many excesses of Youtube gaming culture: they aren’t hyperedited, they aren’t overloaded with sound effects and swishy graphics, neither of them feel like they’re aimed at 14-year-olds, and no video in any of their series looks like it’s trying to complete with Tiktok. Whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing–well, let me clarify your thinking for you. It’s a good thing. It’s a very good thing.

Segaiden #30: Master System, Snail Maze, and Hang On & Safari Hunt (Youtube, 19 minutes)

Josh’s Favorite Games of 2022 – Puzzle

For this entry in my best of 2022 series, my favorite puzzle games, which is separate from adventure.