Tag: youtube

Windows NT on the Nintendo Gamecube & Wii

I had a bad fall from a bike a few days ago and my arm is still really weak, which has affected how much typing I can put into these posts. Still, I am getting better, and so here’s two videos of people installing Windows NT 4.0 to Nintendo consoles, using an ISO of the install CD and tools and information posted here, and in the Gamecube’s case some hardware mods.

This kind of hack isn’t of the type like people claiming to “install” Windows to a Nintendo DS, but in fact are using DOSbox running on the DS. They get a bit of credit for coming up with a clever solution, but it’s not running on the metal, in the parlance. This is about actually running literal Microsoft NT on the actual Nintendo Gamecube/Wii, with no emulation layers or similar shenanigan interposed between.

The first one is from “Spawn Wave,” who has the Bright Young Broadcaster style to his video, meaning, his records from a dark room of equipment, his camera close to his face, he speaks loudly and squeezes in that like and/or subscribe prompt early, and generally tries to impress personality into his video. Mind, I don’t think all of this has to be bad, and Spawn Wave is a lot less obnoxious than many other YouPotatoes I’ve seen. There’s a blessed lack of sound effects or swoopy editing. His video’s only nine minutes long, so if you’re pressed for time, this is the one to watch.

I tend to prefer videos more like Michael MJD’s overview, which is also much longer at 31 minutes. He’s installing on a Wii, which is more powerful and performs better, and doesn’t need hardware mods. His is of the Hands Intruding From Offscreen school of video, but he’s more laid-back, and with that much time can fit more information without having to squeeze it in. This is better for people wanting to positively luxuriate in the process of installing NT4 to systems not intended for it.

The question of why, oh why, someone would do this, must remain unanswered. Some people just like making computers do weird things. It’s an odd form of entertainment, but entirely valid. Now, when will someone get Linux running on CoreWar?

Lost Port of Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow For Nokia Flip Phones

“Dr4gonBlitz” on Youtube found and played though a Nokia port of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. It makes for a very interesting watch for people familiar with the original. (38m)

The player’s style is hyperbolic, in the common Youtuber style, but he knows the original. Dawn of Sorrow was made as a Nintendo DS game first and foremost, using many of its hardware features including its two screens and touchscreen, and I’m surprised any port was made, let alone one for pre-Apple smartphones

I always find it interesting to see how games get redesigned for lesser hardware, like the Tiger Game.Com port of Symphony of the Night. In Dawn of Sorrows’ case, most of the game’s souls, items and weapons were removed, the map was mostly kept the same but had some changes, several bosses didn’t make it, and “Aricado,” Alucard in disguise, isn’t even in the game. On the other hand, they added in a new item called a “Lost Soul” that serves as an auto-activating, one-time extra life.

The video is worth a look for IGA-style Castlevania fans!

Sunday Sunday: Fanmade Music Video Starring Vibri

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

Vibri is from NaNaOn-Sha’s classic bring-your-own-CD rhythm game Vib-Ribbon. P. Carredo is a Youtube content maker who’s done a lot of videos starring the angular rabbit. And Roll Along is the last of the six playable songs in that game, notable for being difficult due to its fluctuating beat, which speeds up and slows down in a way that’s tricky to match.

Mix them all up and we have this music video. The second pink Vibri is her version from Vib-Ribbon’s sequel Vib-Ripple, which came out on the Playstation 2 and so has better graphic effects. (2 ½ minutes)

An “Arcade Raid” in West Virginia

The title of the video makes it sound like feds crashing an illegal gaming establishment or something, but instead, it’s a number of people who discovered an abandoned house with a bunch of arcade games in it! And they didn’t crash it uninvited, but instead, once they figured out it existed, they contacted the Mayor’s office of the nearby town, discovered that the property had fallen into the town’s ownership, and arranged to purchase the machines from them. So, a happy ending! (34 minutes)

Well, mostly happy. Some of the machines had been stolen in the meantime, and some of them weren’t in great shape. The Centipede they tried to rescue fell apart. But they did manage to obtain a real classic, an Atari Food Fight, one of the arcade games designed by GCC, who also hacked together Ms. Pac-Man for Bally/Midway, and Quantum, also for Atari. It’s overall a nice story, as these machines aren’t getting any younger.

The video concludes with gameplay of the two rescuers competing against each other at Food Fight, and one of them managed to trigger a full-length Instant Replay, playing the complete (I believe) Instant Replay music, which is rarely heard since it gets trimmed to the length of the play, and requires waiting out nearly the entire timer to hear it!

Sundry Sunday: The Sounds of Luigi

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

Something of a follow-up to last week’s post, this one’s another of nathorz’s animations of Nintendo voices (1 ½ minutes), this time of perennial second-banana Luigi. Most are from Charles Martinet’s voicing, but there’s also Danny Wells from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, and John Leguizamo from the first Super Mario Bros. movie. There’s also some voices I don’t recognize; I presume Luigi from the more-recent Super Mario Bros. movie is in there somewhere.

Some other of nathorz’s animations include sounds of Kirby, Wario, Yoshi and the Kong of Donk.

C64 Demo: NINE by Iftkryo

The demoscene is a rich source of awesome, and at times ridiculous, imagery and sounds. Once in a while we sift through it to find things to entertain you with.

On Youtube, some Commodore 64 observers have been in a bit of a tizzy examining a new demo by Iftkryo, called NINE (3m).

If you don’t know anything about the computer, it might not seem too interesting. A block-graphics wizard lifts his hat and out comes nine large digits in different colors that then float around the screen.

The more you know about the Commodore 64, though, the more interesting it is. The machine’s graphics chip, the VIC II, is can only display eight hardware sprites at once. Then the sprites cluster together on the same scanline, meaning ordinary multiplexing can’t be happening. Then they drift up into the upper boarder. It demonstrates complete mastery of the hardware, doing a lot of things that simply shouldn’t be possible.

Iftkryo has produced a video giving away his secrets, closely explaining how the demo does its magic (22m):

It’s a good exploration of a number of weird C64 graphics tricks: sprite multiplexing of course, opening up the side and top boarders, and making productive use of mysterious graphics that appear off the top of the screen if the boarder is gone. While little code is shown, it’s definitely on the more technical end of things we present here. I’d give it a four out of five on Drebnar’s Geekiness Scale. But if you like learning about obscure tech details of a forty-year-old computer? And who doesn’t? There it is!

Balatro University Explains “naneinf” And How To Reach It

How do you reach an impossible score, so high that the counting system malfunctions and vomits up gibberish?

Everyone’s hooked on Balatro, the deck builder where the deck you build is made, not of nonsense cards with wizards on them, but basic types like Aces and Jacks. You start with a deck of 52 cards and try to make an increasingly valuable set of poker hands, but you can get Jokers that change the rules, Tarot cards that let you replace or remove cards from your deck, and can outright buy new cards to put in. Buy you can also mod your cards to be worth more, or multiply your score. You can advance your hands so they’re more valuable, and make secret hands like Five of a Kind.

The ultimate goal of Balatro is to reach 100,000 chips in one round, a goal that seems impossible when the first round sees you struggling to make 300. But 100,000 isn’t the end, it keeps scaling past that in its “Endless Mode” where Ante goal requirements can increase by a factor of 20 or more.

But Endless Mode has an end. Balatro uses Lua’s math routines to handle its goal and chip counters, and if either gets too high it loses track, throws up its hands and calls it “naneinf,” a value that always compares false, and so is useless to get and can’t be reached. This score is so big that written out entirely it’d have over 308 digits.

The channel Balatro University covers many aspects of the game, and they have a new 28-minute video where they explain what the word means (it’s “nan e inf,” or “Not a Number raised to the power of 10 times Infinity”) and the six specific ways to reach it. I’m afraid that people who aren’t already soaked in the details of the game might not get much out of it, it’s made for addicts and uses game terms without explaining them, but it might be interesting to visit that world for a bit, and let the weirdness wash over you.

Sundry Sunday: Mario Gibberish

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

Since Mario 64, Charles Martinet certainly recorded a lot of noises for Mario and Luigi. If you look far enough (specifically, to the Mario & Luigi games for GBA and DS) you can find some entertaining random Italian-like sounds. Mayo on Youtube combined some of these noises with comical animation, to produce these very short (1/2 minute) videos.

Luigi:

Mario:

Together:

And with an unexpected intrusion:

Sundry Sunday: There’s Something About Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket

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

I never got into the Pokemon Trading Card Game scene. I never got into Magic either. The thing about trading card games, I’ve always said, sometimes twice in a row even, is they seem more like a business model than a game.

It’s not that they don’t have good design, really, but that the purpose of that game is to make it so that players buy more cards. And despite that, whenever I bring this up among obsessed players, they say it doesn’t take money to win. No, but it makes winning much more likely. More money gets you more cards, and statistically, that means you get better cards. More money means you can outright buy better cards from traders. Money rules all, just like it does in the actual real physical world, and that’s something I play games to escape.

Recently the Pokemon Company released a second app version of their money-printing game. This one promises streamlined rules, and lets you get booster packs without paying cash, although being “free to play,” monetization is sadly a big part of the game.

Word is, it is also infuriatingly difficult to win at, an experience that TerminalMontage, creator of the “Something About” series of animations, captures aptly in their new animation. (8 minutes)

My opinion of the Something About cartoon is scattered. There’s some funny episodes in there, but it also relies a lot on the “earsplitting scream EXPLOSION” gag. It happens at least once in this video. And sometimes it substitutes hyper-energy for actual jokes. Yet, hidden amidst the LOLrandom, the good ones really are good. Will you find this one to be so? There’s but one way to find out.

Abyssoft Explains Smash Melee’s Home Run Contest World Records

The Home Run Contest in Super Smash Bros. is such a unique part of the game. It began in Melee (the second Smash Bros. game, the one on Gamecube) and has reliably returned in each version since then.

In Super Smash Bros.’ normal mechanics, characters attack each other to increase their opponent’s damage percentage. The higher a character’s damage, effectively, the lighter they become, and the easier they are to knock around with strong attacks. The object is to knock the opponent so far away that they leave the arena, either so they fall off the main platform and off the bottom of the screen, or so far to the side or top that they cross a kill line and are defeated.

The standoff: a character, a sandbag, and a bat.

The Home Run Contest is a solo mode where the kill line is removed on the right side of the screen. The arena scrolls infinitely to the right. On a platform on the left edge is a special opponent character, Sandbag-kun, or just Sandbag, who’s just a large cylindrical mass with a couple of eyes. Sandbag has no moves, and mostly just stands there. The aim is, to wrack up as much damage as you can over 10 seconds, then use the strongest attack your character has to knock it to the right. To assist in this, the game hands you a Home Run Bat, the game’s strongest attack item, to send it off with. The distance Sandbag flies is determined by the strength of your attack and the damage you’ve done to it. The game records the highest distance each character has been able to send it, and adds them all together for an overall record.

As is predictable for a game as fussed-over as Smash Melee, over the 26 years since its players have come up with all kinds of ridiculous strategies for flinging it downscreen. Later Smash games would do things like have the sun rise and fall as it spins through the air, but Smash Melee just lets it sail through the sky.

It’s an information-dense 25 minutes, but I’ve cued it up about two and a half minutes in to skip a lengthy intro and ad embed. Here’s the video from the start.

Size-Changing Effects in Super Mario Bros Wonder

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is 15 months old now, and as is usual for games this far out, the hype around it has died down. But this video, and its information, has been in my to-post file for a long time, so let’s get it checked off of my list.

In Super Mario Bros. Wonder, every level has a “wonder effect,” a sometimes-optional event that changes the gameplay in some surprising way. Like the Piranha Plants might start singing and marching through the level. That kind of thing.

There is a level with a boss fight against Bowser Jr. where he makes himself really small (accidentally), then really large, and the player’s size changes to the opposite: really big, then really tiny. The player’s physics change to reflect their new volume.

As it turns out, this effect is, in a way, faked. During this whole fight, the player’s size doesn’t change at all! Instead, the room changes size, and the camera is zoomed in or out so it’s not noticeable. Junior’s size actually changes twice as much. The changes to the player’s physics are applied on top of this state.

Rimea on Youtube made a video, like a whole year ago, that applied the Wonder effects from the boss fight in normal levels, and the player’s character doesn’t change size at all there, there’s the physics changes and that’s all. Then they put some other objects in the room, some question mark blocks, and they change size along with the room, making the camera gimmick a bit more obvious.

Here is their video explaining and demonstrating how the effect is done (6m). Why is it implemented like this? My guess is that the player movement routines in Mario games are really complex and detailed, and any time when it comes to a decision whether to change it or something else, the developers do everything they can to not mess with the precise and exacting parts of the engine, for fear of breaking some other obscure part of the game. The player program has to be used throughout the whole game, while the boss and its room are only used in one part, so it risks breaking fewer things to put the changes all on them. That’s how I see it, yeah.