Tag: youtube

A Look At Beta Versions of the Wii Channels

An internal Nintendo metaphor for the Wii’s UI was “more channels for the TV.” It’s a particularly Old Dad idea for the Wii really, as even at that time broadcast TV was beginning to decline in popularity, but it may have made more sense in Nintendo’s home territory.

The experiences of these channels, the Mii Channel, the News Channel, the Weather Channel, the Shop Channel and the like, are receding in memory, although there are fan efforts to revive them and connect them to new information sources. But at the other end of their development life, of their pre-release development very little has ever been known. Early Wiis had stubs in their place, that only directed the user to installing a launch-day update. (I experienced this myself! I drove 140 miles in order to wait in a line for a Wii on its launch day, November 19, 2006. I’m objectively insane.)

Those stubs weren’t the true original versions of the Wii Channels, they had been in development within Nintendo for some time. Those development versions of the Wii software have never been leaked outside the company, but there exists footage of them from various sources. Bjohn on Youtube has compiled what we know about the development Wii Channels into a 21-minute video. Here it is:

There’s a fair amount there, including early versions of the Internet Channel and early evidence of plans to include DVD support. (The Wii has a fully-operational DVD drive, but to avoid playing a license fee to the DVD Consortium it cannot play DVDs without hacks.)

Beta Wii Channels! (Bjohn on Youtube, 21 minutes)

Sundry Sunday: Crash Bandicoot Carnival Japan-only Cutscenes

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

Crash Bash was Crash Bandicoot’s attempt to move into the Mario Party genre of minigame compilations. It was the first Crash game to be made by someone other than Naughty Dog, and the last to be released exclusively for Sony platforms. In Japan, the game was known as Crash Bandicoot Carnival. All of this comes from the Wikipedia page.

Japanese Crash, from “Bandipedia“

Now we venture into weirder waters. For Crash had a weird ad campaign in Japan. In Japan, Crash had a slightly different character design, with rounder eyes and five fingers on his hands. (The Japanese market has a weird thing about four fingered hands.) And also, he had an extremely catchy theme song and associated dance, which which the series seems to have became associated. We linked to that song here before, almost exactly two years ago!

The theme song music video seems to have been an unlockable in some version of Crash Bandicoot or its sequels. CBC had some other little videos included, including live-action bits with a lady and someone in a Crash mascot costume. It seems to be a retrospective of the previous Crash games, including kart racers and a little handheld device virtual pet that I don’t know the name of, but they were missing something if they didn’t call it a Crashigatchi. You also get to hear the lady say “Arabian Nigh-toooo!” free of context.

They total sixteen minutes in all, and they’re this week’s offering for Sundry Sunday. Enjoy them, won’t you? Thank you. Crash Bandicoooot, Crash Bandicoo-OOoot! Crashi-bandi-bandicoot!

Have an extra, hidden cutscenes from the Japanese version of Crash Bandicoot 3 (13 minutes)!

The Chances of Unlikely Layouts in Minesweeper

I’ve saved this one up for a while. For those of you who remember when Minesweeper was distributed — for free?? — with every copy of Microsoft Windows. What are the odds that unlikely layouts, like 8s, or neighboring 7s, are possible in that game? Alternatively, is it possible to get a game that can be completed in one move? Find out here (16 minutes):

Balatro University’s Beginner’s Guide to Extremely High Scores

It’s a long one today folks. To mark the release of the mobile version of poker-based time sink Balatro, let’s sit back, for two hours and 42 minutes, and watch Balatro University plot their way through the first eight antes of a game:

The video says it’s part 1 of 2, and ends after the nominal win, but the game doesn’t end there. If you want to watch the rest of the game, it’ll take another two hours and 27 minutes of your time, to get to Ante 18.

Irrelevant note in passing: the Youtube ID for this video contains four consecutive lowercase ‘u’s.

High-level Balatro is a game of extremely big numbers, and Ante 18’s requirements are along the lines of 5.53130, which in regular notation is 5,531,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Be still my beating heart! If you just want to jump to where the game starts to get insane, try this link to a moment a little into that video.

So if you don’t want to watch five hours of video but still wan to know something of what’s going on? First off they use a lot of Purple Seals. Every time a Purple Seal card is discarded you receive a random consumable Tarot card. Tarot cards have a bunch of uses. Two of them give you money, but most of them give you some way to modify your deck. Particularly, Strength lets you increase the rank of two cards, Hanged Man lets you destroy two cards, and Death lets you turn one card into a copy of a different one.

With enough Tarot cards you can perform potent crimes against power, like turning your entire deck into a single type of card! That not only makes some poker hands, like Four of a Kind, or the secret hand Flush Five, really easy to make, but it lets you exploit certain Jokers that operate on a different card each round. These Jokers always pick one of the cards in your deck at random, but if you only have one type of card, they have to pick that one!

The most valuable kind of Joker for the long haul is one that gives you multiple Mult Multipliers, and to retrigger those multipliers. A Glass card multiplies your Mult by 2; a Glass card with a Red Seal multiplies it by 2 twice; other Jokers that retrigger cards multiply it by 2 more times.

It sounds fairly simple written out here, but setting up this system is where the skill lies. While I observe that the real game of Balatro isn’t merely in performing these ludicrous offenses to mathematics, but in figuring our how to do them, watching a really high-level player smash through its strictures and rules might give you some ideas for improving your own game, even if you don’t follow Balatro University’s techniques exactly.

Hidden Flags in Earthbound, and the Mole Playing Rough

It’s a bit old, but Chaz on Youtube has a great video explaining some weird facts about Earthbound, including mysterious crashes, when the game registers the effects of statuses like Sunstroke, and why there’s a small number of places in the game where you can find an early enemy, the Mole Playing Rough, in regions where you usually find much stronger enemies. It’s ten minutes long:

Here’s the gist:

Earthbound maintains a flag that the video calls the Overworld Status Supression Flag. If this flag is on then your characters can’t get a number of statuses like Sunstroke, or take environmental damage. If this flag is on, though, and your party loses to a scripted (not random) battle, then a bug is triggered that’s popularly called the Game Over Glitch: the battle loss cutscene music plays, but the screen turns black and nothing appears to work. In fact, the game has not crashed: entering the Town Map screen, or feeling around for and entering a door, will display graphics again, although glitched out. The Game Over Glitch is best known for happening if the player loses to one of the Shattered Man fights in the Museum after the game has been won: during the ending, the Overworld Status Supression Flag is set on permanently, so getting into any scripted fight and losing will result in the glitch happening.

As it turns out, random encounters disable the flag. So there is a hard-to-avoid Mole Playing Rough at the entrances to areas with environmental damage, to make sure the flag is turned off. But the mole is just hard to avoid, not impossible, so if you can avoid it, and all other random enemies of course, and then reach a place with a scripted fight, then lose to it, the glitch will still happen.

Behind the Code on Why is Contra Force Slow?

Displaced Gamers’ Behind the Code series is one of the best explainers of the quirks of NES games on Youtube. It’s not afraid to dive into the assembly code itself if need be, but its videos can often be understood by people without deep technical backgrounds.

Here is their video on the coding problems with Konami’s Contra Force (24 minutes):

Watch the video for the full spiel, but here’s a summary.

Once upon a time, in the waning days of the Famicom, Konami planned to release a game called Arc Hound in Japan. It was going to be another of their trademark run-and-gun shooters, along the lines of Contra. It even received coverage in enthusiast magazines in Japan, and it probably would have used one of Konami’s bespoke mapper chips like the VRC6 that the Japanese version of Castlevania III used.

Arc Hound was likely far into development when the decision was made to not release it in the Japanese market. Producing a game cartridge requires a substantial investment in parts and marketing, of course, and they must have judged that they couldn’t make enough of a profit off of it in their home territory: the Super Famicom was already out, as well as Contra III on that platform. But the NES still had a little bit of life left in it in the US, so they decided to give the game a shot over here, as a title in the Contra series

A big problem there was Nintendo’s policies towards manufacturing NES games. Nintendo demanded the right to build all the licensed software for the NES, and further restricted most (although not all) publishers to using Nintendo’s own family of mappers. Konami had been forced to revise their games to use Nintendo’s mappers in other games: Castlevania III famously used a different mapper in Japan, one that offered greatly expanded sound capabilities that worked through the Famicom’s sound channel pass-through, but was incompatible with the NES.

Extra sound channels are nice, but the primary use for most mapper chips is bank switching, swapping different sections of a cartridge’s data into the Famicom/NES’s 6502-workalike’s 64K address space, and also potentially making different sections of the game’s graphics data visible to the PPU graphics chip.

Behind the Code’s examination of the game program reveals that a large portion of the time of each frame is spent in setting up bank switches. Whether it was coded poorly, or just that Konami didn’t want to pay to include a mapper with more a more efficient bank switching mechanism, the game wastes a lot of time just pulling in different banks of data to be visible to the NES’s hardware. So it is that Contra Force could have run a lot better, but Konami either didn’t want to expend the coding effort, or pay for the the mapping hardware, to allow it to do so.

Presumably, somewhere in Konami’s archives, there is a version of Arc Hound that uses a VRC chip to handle mapping, and that runs much more smoothly. Maybe someday it’ll come to light, although I wouldn’t lay any bets on it. More likely perhaps is that someone will hack up the code and make such a version themselves. Who knows?

Banjo-Kazooie Decompiled

Kaze Emanuar on Youtube passes along the info that Rare’s terrific N64 platformer, Banjo-Kazooie, has been decompiled (7 minutes):

What does that mean? It’s that they’ve created source code (up on GitLab) that, when put through the same C compiler that originally generated Banjo-Kazooie’s object code, produces an exact binary image of the game. They can now rebuild Banjo-Kazooie. They don’t know the original variable names or any comments that were in the code, so it doesn’t mean that the code is perfectly understandable, but it is a major breakthrough in using the game engine for other things, including game improvements, mods, repurposings, and even compiling it for other platforms.

One result of this is that we now have a complete list of the codes that can be entered into the infamous Sandcastle Room, which are obfuscated in the original binary. The Sandcastle Room is a board of letters on the ground in the second level that can be used to spell things out, and if the proper text is entered it can unlock things in the game, or even enable the items in the abandoned “STOP N SWOP” feature that had been planned to allow players to transfer data between cartridges. If you decide to take a look yourself, the codes are listed out in the file named code_3E30.c.

Sundry Sunday: Proving Grounds of the Bard Fox

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

Taking a short break form gushing over Atari Games’ Rampart to bring you this fun, short animation, by Only Jerry, set to the battle theme of the Japan-only PC Engine version of Wizardry. It’s only a minute or so, so please enjoy!

Sunsoft Hebereke Cartoons

Hebereke is that NES game, released in European territories as Ufouria, with the cute, yet somewhat bizarre, characters. It recently got a Switch release (“Enjoy edition”), and kind of a sequel.

Sunsoft has released some animations of Hebe and his friends on their Youtube channel. Each is very short, and entirely in Japanese, but most of them don’t have words anyway, and they’re all of a style of humor that I don’t think they make a huge amount of sense even in their native language.

They’re all collected in this playlist, but a couple of selections should help you understand what you’re in for. All of these are about one minute long.

Hebe buys a toy gun:

Hebe and Sukezaemon race on what I’m going to call jet-powered “vehicles”:

And, trouble with bird poop:

Legends of Wario

There’s this image going around, referred to in this video as a “greentext” image, in that way that people who are very online will just throw out there and expect that everyone knows what they’re talking about when other people (like myself) who are at least as online don’t know because they weren’t online in the same way. It seems that a “greentext” image is that way because it’s a quote in an old 4chan thread. Bleh.

But anyway. Said image is a list of obscure, but apparently canonical, facts about everyone’s favorite money-grubbing antiplumber, Wario. Narrator Mish Koz goes through each fact and tries to determine from whence it came. Many of them are sourced from an old Nintendo website. They’re entertaining at least, for 17 minutes. Here is the video:

The facts are:

  • He has a bee allergy
  • He likes wrestling & country music
  • His favorite foods
  • He can bench press 200 kg
  • Dr Crygor uses him as a guinea pig for his experiments
  • He goes treasure hunting with Mona
  • He gave 9-Volt a GBA
  • The reason for his immortality is he doesn’t feel like dying
  • Things Wario hates: smart things, jerks that are stingy with their money, chocolate with peanuts, marron glacés, peppers and jigsaw puzzles
  • Wario’s spending habits: he spends most of it on food
  • He ate 100 Poison Mushrooms and red and white spots appeared over his body
  • He washes his clothes every 10 days
  • The source of his powers: garlic
  • He has a farming background, although no one seems to actually know the source for this fact

Investigating the Wario Greentext (Youtube, 17 minutes)

Mission: Impossible for CP/M

Set Side B’s mission statement is to cover three categories of gaming: retro, which let’s be honest is most of what we do; indie, often the province of blogmate Josh Bycer; and niche, which is usually what all the Nintendo stuff gets filed under.

Well, you don’t get much more niche than the category of CP/M gaming. CP/M, or “Control Program for Microcomputers,” is an ancient OS for 8-bit Z80 computers that recently turned 50. Half a century old! While CP/M was very popular in its era and had a lot of software made for it, much of it is obscure and hard to find now, and in histories of home computing tends to get largely overshadowed by Apple and Commodore. It’s a huge vanished scene, but it can be thought of as the DOS before DOS: the OS that would become PC-DOS, then later MS-DOS, was made as a recreation of CP/M’s API for the 8086 family of processors.

If you think MS-DOS software looks primitive then CP/M will appear to you like the freaking Stone Age. MS-DOS had early adapters like CGA and EGA for graphics, but CP/M had none of those. The point of CP/M was that it ran on a plethora of systems, from manufacturers like Kaypro and Osbourne. Many big microcomputers from the age, like the Commodore 64, TRS-80 and Atari 8-bit line, had add-on cartridges with Z80 processors in them so they could take advantage of the huge CP/M software library. Since the point of CP/M, as would be for MS-DOS later, then Windows after that, was cross-compatibility, it had to run on all those systems. But it didn’t have the IBM PC’s standardized graphics hardware, so little, if any, CP/M software took advantage of special graphics functionality. It’s all terminal gaming.

A beneficiary of the limited prospects for games on the CP/M was Infocom, which released a number of their early titles, including the Zork trilogy, on CP/M, which wouldn’t be held back by the lack of graphics. But other games were made. Many of these titles were reviewed by the ultra-niche blog TechTinkering, which has a Youtube channel, which uploaded video of a lot of CP/M software, including Mission: Impossible.

Mission: Impossible, by Richard Altman, is one of the category of terminal games, which are often played by printing information on the game state to the screen, then asking the player to enter options from a numbered list. In addition to only rarely having real-time play, because there are no visual or aural components to engage the senses, a lot of the weight has to be borne by the gameplay, which often means it’s pretty difficult. It’s of the class of games that can be found in David Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games books, games like Star Trek, Lemonade Stand and Hammurabi.

Mission: Impossible is a fairly complex game that I don’t yet fully understand. Here, watch TechTinkering’s 19-minute video on it.

Mission: Impossible (TechTinkering)

Hidden Dialogue in Earthbound

It might not seem like it, but in the 8- and 16-bit era, text in a game was rather expensive.

The expressive power of an English sentence is great, but in a way, that of an equal number of bytes of assembly is greater, due to it living and working in the machine, and not just in the head of the player. A page of text is about 700 words; at an average of five characters each, uncompressed that’s 3,500 bytes, or 3.5 kilobytes. By contrast,the whole OS of the Commodore 64, Kernel and BASIC ROMs combined, is 8K.

Most JRPGs are thought to have lots of text, but really they have less than you might think. Square used a few tricks to make a little text seem like more than it really was: like the use of larger fonts, and using graphics to put on little skits to illustrate scenes instead of just displaying them as plain old words. And of course there’s compression. A good compression scheme, while troublesome for fan translators, can still cut down the size of text by half.

But Earthbound is a unique game in many ways, and one of them is the amount of text it has. Creator Shigesato Itoi is a copywriter and essayist, and he wrote a ton of words for Mother 2, Earthbound’s Japanese version. Translator Marcus Lindblom gave it a localization that many regard as one of the greatest of all, that manages to get across much of the wit and charm of the original.

It was a huge task. The text dump on GameFAQs, compiled by someone going by the name “BlueberryButtface,” is 391 kilobytes; the size of the game’s ROM is a bit over 3 megabytes. A direct comparison isn’t really helpful because the dump on the page is uncompressed, but it’s still useful to get a sense of scale.

A lot of this text, as it turns out, is hidden. Not in the sense of being locked off from the player, unused in the game. The text is findable in the game, but much of it is obscure, available only at a specific part of the game, or easy to miss. And, this being Earthbound, much of the text is pretty funny!

On Youtube (again), Cybershell has put together a 28-minute video that uncovers much of this hard-to find text. I already knew about much of it, because I’m weird like that, but it’s nice to have someone present a guide to what’s there and how to find it. A lot of it is the text of the Hint Guy, who, as in the style of Nintendo’s games at the time, will give you a pointer to whatever you have to do next in the story if you pay him a fee. All the hotels in the game have newspaper text appropriate to the point of the story you’re in, even the one way back in Onett, the starting town. Items have interesting descriptions if you think to ask for them. And of course, after you win the game, you can go back in and talk to the NPCs on the way back home, and frog help me, Shigesato Itoi wrote, and Marcus Lindblom translated, congratulatory text for nearly everyone in the game. And there’s more, even than that.

Here’s the video. It’s a fun use of half an hour, if you have any interest in Earthbound.

Rare and Obscure Dialogue in Earthbound (Youtube, 28 minutes)