Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
You know, it’s a effort sometimes to keep up this weekly game culture section. Youtube’s algorithm sucks unless you have an account you use for one purpose and none other, for it’s always trying to send you things related to the very last thing you watched. That means its efficacy as a source of finds varies widely and wildly.
Today’s find, however, is the kind of insanity that makes the effort worth it. It’s no thanks to the Youtube feed either, but from a Bluesky post. As it turns out, they made a music video for Lemmings 2, involving adorable Lemming puppets (4m).
It’s kind of an old subject now. The Legend of Zelda was originally released in 1985, and right with the next game, Nintendo started toying with the formula.
The third game in the series, A Link to the Past, is widely revered among classic game-players, but there’s been this small coterie, growing over the years, that despite greatly improved graphics and controls, a much greater variety in enemies, like 13 dungeons in all and a host of cool secrets, in some ways it’s not up to the original. And the darn thing is, I agree with them.
The Legend of Zelda is kind of the victim of being left behind by design trends, in some ways. Link to the Past is an inflection point; while TLoZ is infuriatingly vague in some ways, and very challenging, some players latched onto those aspects and relished the challenge. Its second-sequel is almost luxurious in how it tells the player how to progress. There are establishments around the fantasy world of Hyrule whose whole purpose is to tell you what to do next. That’s great for making a generally-playable game, but if you want to figure the game out yourself, like solving a great puzzle, it’s lacking.
Its secrets are much less secret. It feels like the world wants you to discover its hidden caves, imagine that. Of the differences between the two, most players preferred the new direction, as did developers, not the least being the makers of the Zelda games themselves.
Of the fans who recognize the first game’s gnomish inscrutability and obscure secrets as a strength, probably the best-known advocate has been Tevis Thompson, who made the case in his 13-year-old essay Saving Zelda. He followed up some of the ideas in the graphic novel Second Quest (which is great), but it more goes in its own directions.
That was where the discussion stood, until the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. After over a dozen games that leaned in to the Link to the Past template, it seemed to represent a rejection of that whole line, of the very trends they themselves had started and build upon. Instead of the mechanistic puzzlebox world, where exploration is carefully gated and players can’t get themselves into situations they’re not ready for, they threw open the doors. Here, have a world not only much bigger than any previous Zelda, but one of the biggest worlds in gaming period. Go anywhere, right from the start! While the secrets are still not that secret, the vast land obscures their locations pretty well, so it adds up to about the same effect.
Breath of the Wild was the first Zelda game that largely felt like Game #1, and there are signs this was intentional. The Japanese release made direct references to the 1985 original, using the font from the cover of the original game for its own title screen and to announce locations, have a look:
Comparison image from (ugh) r/zelda
When the game first game out, there was bewilderment, but players were very appreciative, but, did this mean all Zeldas were going to be vast open-world exploration games now? Tears of the Kingdom seems to indicate, maybe! Then Echoes of Wisdom last year showed that, while that game itself had many changes to the formula (such as actually starring the title character), they had not abandoned the classic formula, or look either.
All of this is to introduce the video by ThePlinkster, which like Thompson did in 2012, makes the case that the first game is still, largely, the best, and it even claims it’s better than BotW, which might be a bit of a reach. It’s 18 minutes, and while I don’t really agree with him entirely, he doesn’t make his case badly. Here it is:
I remember the days when everyone marveled at how many ways to die there were in Nethack. Remember Nethack? Good old Nethack.
Multiple long ages of the internet ago, famed nethacker Boudewijn Wayers wrote a spoiler called To Die: 50 Ways to Leave Your Game. It was published on his long-gone Nethack Home Page, but copies of it remain scattered around the internet, although currently I can only find one copy on Google, from a page on tecfa.unige.ch. I’m quite sad that this venerable piece of hack lore is in danger of extinction, at least to people who don’t know the magic codes to enter on the Wayback Machine.
To Die is a wonderful bit of roguelike lore, so great that I’m posting it in full here soon to help preserve it. But today’s focus is on a more recent variation of it: a Youtube video from TheZZAZZGlitch listing every way to die in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue and Red Rescue Team. (21 minutes)
In the spirit of the communal spoiler files of old, I enter the list of death causes here, in easy-to-search-for text. For the details, I refer you to the video. Note that every source of damage in the game that has the potential to reduce the player’s HP to zero has a corresponding entry in this list, so it serves as a map to every cause of harm in the game’s Pokeverse.
WAYS TO KICK THE POKEBUCKET (33 possible causes)
was defeated by (attacker)’s (move) (this is the most common cause of adventure ending) missed a Jump Kick and wiped out. missed a Hi Jump Kick and wiped out. fainted from the foe’s Destiny Bond. (an instadeath) fainted, covered in sludge. fainted from a move’s recoil damage. fainted from damage it took bouncing. was defeated by a foe’s pent-up energy. fainted from stepping on spikes. fainted from a bad burn. fainted, unable to bear constriction. fainted after the poison spread. fainted while still being wrapped. was felled by a curse. was drained to nothing by Leech Seed. fainted from hearing Perish Song. (another instadeath) fainted while in a nightmare. was felled by a thrown rock. fainted from hunger. disappeared in an explosion. tripped a Chestnut Trap and fainted. fell into a Pitfall Trap and fainted. was defeated by a Blast Seed’s damage. was transformed into an item. (instadeath) fainted from being knocked flying. was felled by a Pokemon sent flying. gave up the exploration. (quitting the game, not explicitly a death, but serves the same purpose) was blown out by an unseen force. (spent too long on a single floor and was expelled by the Winds of Kron) returned with the fallen partner. (your sidekick fainted, so you left too, automatically) fainted due to the weather. failed to protect the client Pokemon. (FISSION MAILED) fainted from a Wonder Orb. fainted from an item.
Unattainable but still used in the code, waiting for a moment that can never come (7 causes):
was transformed into a friend. (what?) left without being befriended. (hwat?) was defeated by debug damage. (nooo not debug damage) was felled by a thrown item. was deleted for the sake of an event. (oh okay then) went away. (so long) was possessed. (spooky)
Three messages exist in the code but with no way to activate them, even theoretically:
fainted from a debug attack. was defeated by a powerful move. fainted due to a trap’s damage.
Displaced Gamers is one of the best NES gaming channels on Youtube. They do sterling work diving into the very code of the games, to figure out what they are like they are. We link to nearly every video they do. Here’s a recap:
Well here’s another, and it actually is a follow-up to a video that I don’t think we linked to before. So here’s that video first, on Micronics’ port of Ghosts n’ Goblins to NES. (32 minutes)
Pretty long already, exquisitely geeky! Well its successor is even more geeky, as they actually reprogrammed the game to have a more optimized sprite engine. Although it’s a shorter video, at 24 minutes!
Ghost n’ Goblins is designed around being a 20fps game, so no amount of optimization will change that, it requires more substantial modification. But the time visualizations they use indicate that it may be possible to change that to 30fps, and with other changes 60fps may be possible. Mind you, the logic for the player, enemies and weapons all assume 20fps, so unless they’re changed to account moving to 60 frames per second will triple the speed of the game, so that obviously would need to be changed as well. I look forward to seeing the next chapter in this retrocoding saga.
Kosmic is a speedrunner who usually focuses on Super Mario Bros., but he’s reached the kill screen in Donkey Kong before. With some help, he’s figured out a way to complete that game’s “kill screen,” the point where it’s usually impossible to continue.
At Level 22 of Donkey Kong, there is a bug that causes the game to only give Mario (nèe Jumpman) 400 bonus timer points to complete the level. (The screen displays 4000, but that’s caused by a different glitch.) Playing normally, that’s not enough time to reach higher than the second girder on-screen.
However. If the player has Mario climb the first broken latter, then hold down for four frames then up for one, Mario will climb up off the top of it by one pixel. Continuing to do this, Mario can continue to ascend the screen. When he reaches Pauline’s height, the game will declare the level completed and move on to the next screen.
As it turns out, the bonus count on the Barrels screen is tied to the barrels that Donkey Kong throws, and the timing on those is somewhat random. If DK is slow at emitting those rolling obstacles, rarely, that will give Mario just enough time to reach Pauline at the top, and advance to the next level.
Doing this physically is essentially impossible. The player would have to waggle the joystick extremely quickly (and loudly), yet with the precise timing to consistently raise Mario’s position, to get him up the screen in time, and even if that worked, he’d still have to be lucky enough that Donkey Kong was slow at rolling barrels. But in emulation, with tool assistance, Kosmic managed to get to the top and finish the level. Then using other tricks and glitches, he managed to finish the next three levels (Elevators, Barrels again and Cement Factory) too, before his luck ran out at the next Barrels screen and he was unable to continue.
C.B. Brown is a Youtube maker who has a modest, but not huge, following. Three months ago he made a video about an interesting collection of obscure games, and I know just enough about them to know he’s got really good taste. If you’re looking for hidden gems to play, they’re an excellent place to look.
Here’s the collection, which first went up about three months ago and is 20 minutes long. It covers:
Gunpla: Gunman’s Proof, for Super Famicom, a comedy adventure set in the Old West with a strong vibe of A Link to the Past.
Game Freak’s Warriors Legend of the Blue Dragon: The Two Heroes, also for Super Famicom, which has a turn-based, side-view platforming combat system.
Konami’s Monster Maulers, an arcade game, a fighting game where most of your opponents aren’t the other characters but monstrous bosses.
The Violinist of Hamlin, for Super Famicom, a platformer based on a manga property where success depends on the clever use of your assistant/partner/sidekick Flute, who can be thrown around, used as a platform, or dressed up in animal costumes that give her extra abilities.
Samurai Kid, on Gameboy Color, an action-puzzle platformer with gameplay that involves turning enemies into useable blocks.
Willow for NES, Capcom’s semi-obscure action-RPG adaptation of George Lucas’ fantasy movie, with Zelda-like gameplay and unique screen-filling tile animation during fight scenes.
Dragon’s Revenge, a video pinball game on Genesis, a sequel to the TG16 game Devil Crush. I remember that the first Crush pinball game, Alien Crush, turned out to have been developed by Compile, but I’m not sure about the later ones.
Cocoron for Famicom, a platformer where you customize your character for each level by constructing them out of parts.
Top Hunter: Roddy & Cathy, for the Neo Geo, a platformer with plane switching (foreground and background) mechanics.
The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls, for Game Boy, which is semi-famous now for using the engine that would go on to be used for Link’s Awakening, and having characters that cameoed in that game. It has a non-interactive battle system where you and your opponent disappear into a fight cloud, and your health determines if you win.
A really unexpected entry, The Jetsons: Invasion of the Planet Pirates, for SNES, for being a solid platformer with some interesting ideas.
And Crusader of Centy, for Genesis, a Zelda-like where you team up with animals. As the video notes, it’s part of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pass, so if you have that it’s really easy to try out!
C.A. Brown recently made another video with more really solid recommendations in it, but let’s give that video its own focus, in a few days.
It is not my purpose here to steal any of his thunder, but rather, to give you a sense of whether you might want to click through and see what he has to say, and view the gameplay, which I think will give you a much better idea of whether his picks are worth it. A 20 minute video is a considerable investment of time, but he has helpfully marked his video with chapters and links to each game’s section, so it isn’t hard to navigate. Look and see.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s a maxim among D&D players that the deadliest thing the DM has in his arsenal against players is the lowly pool, stream, river, pond, lake or ocean. (Zee Bashew has an entertaining 3-minute video about this.) There’s just so many ways to kill a PC involving water.
Well, this isn’t just a Dungeons & Dragons thing. Sierra On-Line adventure games had many excuses to off a wannabe hero for just thinking about approaching a body of fluid, as Sierra Art’s 4 1/2-minute compilation video demonstrates. Whether it’s drowning in it, being swept down current by it, creatures living in it, or it actually being deadly acid: if it’s liquid, it’s fatal.
That’s not the only adventure game in which the wet stuff will kill you. Famously, the only way to actually die in The Secret of Monkey Island is to hang around too long under water. If you wait for ten minutes down there, Guybrush Threepwood will actually drown, which replaces the action verbs with Bloat, Stare, Bob, Rot and Order Hint Book. (2 minute video)
You can drown in Return to Money Island too (2 1/2 minutes), which is funny because the game is presented as Guybrush telling of his adventure in discovering the secret of Monkey Island to his son, wrecking the whole premise.
I know, lots of posts on this blog end up being about Nintendo in one way or other, but their corporate stance of toymakers, regardless of its truth, means they often do interesting things, and one category of those things is having special animations when you delete save files. But deleting save files is destructive, obviously, so many people never see them. Here’s a video compilation of some of them. Of particular note is the deletion process of Animal Crossing games (yes, them again!), and of all of those there’s the one for the original Gamecube version, which pretty much implies you’re killing your village’s inhabitants. A pretty heavy trip to lay on a kid! Here’s that video, from Nintendo Unity (9 minutes):
There’s been rather a lot of interesting Animal Crossing items to share lately, many of them from the Youtube account of Hunter R, who specializes in AC. He presents the video in today’s find, which is about an interesting relic from Nintendo’s Gamecube era: the e-Reader.
The e-Reader uses a variation of the technology used in QR codes. QR codes, surprisingly date back as far as 1994. Old-time internet layabouts like myself remember the CueCat, a special barcode scanner that was given out for free, under the assumption that they could make money off of them from advertisers using their tech to encode URLs to their sites in their print ads, then users could scan them with their CueCats to jump immediately to their sites. Yes, this was a business model that people once thought could work. Maybe it could have at one point: that’s the major use case for QR codes now.
The e-Reader was rather different. A Gameboy Advance peripheral released in Japan in 2001, and the US in 2002, it could scan tiny dot patterns printed on playing card size pieces of cardboard. Whereas QR codes are intended for small amounts of data like URLs, a single e-Reader card could hold 2,112 bytes of data. The hardware itself had a ROM built-in that contained an NES emulator, so one of the things that could be distributed, on small decks cards, were smaller NES games like the black box series. I had an e-Reader myself back then, and while it’s long since misplaced and probably lost for good, I still have an officially-released pack of cards somewhere with Balloon Fight on it, and also the weird e-Reader variant of Mario Party, which I think I’ve only ever had the chance to play once.
The e-Reader was one of Nintendo’s shorter-lived play experiments, and didn’t last long. But one of the most interesting releases for it was a large sequence of Animal Crossing cards. There were hundreds of these cards, and they were kind of like an early version of the current-day Animal Crossing amiibo cards. It’s amazing there were so many, because the hardware requirements were significant: you needed a Gamecube and GC Animal Crossing disk, of course, and the e-Reader, and a Gameboy Advance, and a GBA/GC link cable. And the cards themselves, of course.
The cards could be used to get all kinds of items in your Animal Crossing village, depending on the card. The amazing thing about the cards is that they seem like they’d be the kind of thing that would have been quickly cracked and turned into a way to obtain arbitrary objects, like the never-released Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda NES items in Animal Crossing, but were in fact only broken fairly recently.
The 11-minute video linked here explains how they worked and how they were cracked, and also links to a GitHub repository with program that can be used to generate your own cards. But Hunter R. has been on this beat for a while, and has two other videos on the subject you can peruse if you wish, on generating custom villagers with cards (12 minutes), and generating Super Mario and Zelda NES items (18 minutes). The villager one is interesting because you can make arbitrary villagers with it, with appearances and names not among the ones included on the disk, although only using the Japanese version of the e-Reader. Even you don’t have the magic combination of gadgets to make practical use of them, they’re interesting watches to understand how the e-Reader worked, and how it was, eventually, exploited.
Argh! This video from Press A! on Youtube promises big by promising to explain how speedrunners blast through the over 5 1/2 million Bells needed to fully upgrade their (pre-2.0) house in Animal Crossing New Horizons, but then in typical game Youtuber fashion they explain nearly everything else about the game, the debt, and all the other things speedrunners must do along the way! Here is the 12-minute video, but I’ll give you the gist below:
First: the glitch only works on version 1.2.1 or earlier, so nowadays it requires hacks to downgrade your Switch to do them. And the trick also means having at least two users on the same Switch, both with residents on the island.
The trick involves duplicating items, then selling the duplicates. The items are duplicated by putting an item that can have other objects put on top of it, like tables or the cardboard boxes in the Recycle Bin, down near the border of the town square area.
First, an expensive item is put on the table or box. The Switch promo item given to the first player upon starting the game is typically used by runners. Both players are brought in, then the second player spins the box while the first player picks the item up off of the box. If done on the same frame, Player One will pick up the item, but Player Two’s rotating of the box will mean it also remains on the box. Now there’s two copies of the item. This process can be repeated immediately, filling up Player One’s inventory with the item. They then sell the items for profit, and continue.
I miss the days when you could just find this out from a text file on GameFAQs, but then tricks like that are a lot harder to discover randomly these days without something like Youtube’s discovery algorithm to uncover them, although it too is random and scattershot, or else following a ton of Discords to seek out all of the little gaming communities where all this data is hoarded.
So that is how they do it, but since it’s specifically on an old version of the game that you can’t even play anymore it’s of limited use to normal players. New Horizons changed so much in that first year that this information is largely of use as a curiosity unless you’re involved in the frankly bizarre speedrunning community.
My own trick for paying off your house means breeding expensive roses, ideally blue but black will do, then growing tons of them in the fields of your island and selling them. If you have the DIY recipes to make wreathes or crown from them, then it doubles their sale price. It won’t pay off your house of in under two hours, but if you can get your starter roses from elsewhere, you can pay it off much faster that way, maybe in a couple of months. I’ve explained the details of that process before, and in multiple places, but hey at least I didn’t just post it in a Discord where non-obsessives will never see it.
There, that’s my annoyed internet oldbie rant for today. Come back tomorrow where I’ll shake my fist at something else, probably AI slop. Ta!
