Tag: youtube

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.

Sundry Sunday: Louie Zong’s Garlic Jam

Louie Zong makes a bunch of fun song videos! Once in a while they’re game related. This one’s a short album made with Warioware D.I.Y’s composition feature. Even though it’s only about 12 minutes long, there’s ten songs squeezed in there, and each come and gone so soon that none have the opportunity to bore your brain.

The Nintendo Font

Youtuber T2norway educates us on a very commonly used font for Nintendo products from around the Gamecube era onward, especially remembered for its use in Wii Sports and other Wii software:

New Rodin

The video’s only four minutes long but the basic gist is that it’s actually two closely-related fonts, New Rodin and Shin Go, both based on a typeface created in 1975 called Gona. They have been called the Japanese version of Helvetica. They see frequent use in Japan in media, on signage, and of course in games too!

What’s the deal with this font? (Youtube, T2norway, 4 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Elegy for Waluigi

Let’s explore further the Youtube archives of Matthew Taranto, a.k.a. BitFinity, a.k.a. the Brawl in the Family guy. Last time we met Eario, Janitor of the Mushroom Kingdom. Now we meet his supposed son Waluigi, who Nintendo themselves have never quite known what to do with, and sort of the breakout character of BitF.

Waluigi has long been excluded from the Smash Bros. games as a playable character, at beast appearing as an assist trophy. This video is his lament at his perpetual status as outsider, set to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which scans precisely with “Waluigi”:

In a way though, this video is an echo of an earlier song, a closer tribute to Hallelujah featuring Waluigi, which has sadly seems to have been taken off of Youtube, but lives on in a number of imitators that are easily searchable.

There’s quite a few other Waluigi videos, lying around Youtube like broken dreams. We’ll get to those in due time.