Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
WiggleWood is a Youtube channel that produces humorous short videos with an old-school computer vibe. They could be cutscenes from an old Sierra adventure. None are very long (the longest us under two minutes), but are entertaining enough to have a look at. Here are all five to date:
The Wizard’s Gummy (43s), what is the nature of his system of divination?
Magician’s Brick (31s), who is “Wormdal?” Later videos imply that he’s a wizard too.
The Dark Summoning (45s), here’s Wormdal. He doesn’t seem to be exceptionally evil though, just lonely.
The Magic Lamp (1m43s): The barbarian and the wizard again. It’s best to watch your tongue in matters concerning genies.
And the last one currently, The Cursed Throne (1m47s). Wormdal and the demon lady seem to have reached an accord of sorts. It’s nice to see old enchanters making new friends.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
In Breath of the Wild, Link can buy and furnish a house on the edge of Hateno Village. In Tears of the Kingdom, it’s revealed that in the interim between games Zelda’s moved into that house in the absence of Hyrule Castle. But it doesn’t seem that Link lives there anymore (he can construct a new house outside of Tarry Town). How did that happen? What went down between the two games?
ColaBear, who makes fun Zelda videos generally, speculates on this event in a 2 1/2 minute video:
Obsession is simultaneously a wonderful and a terrible thing. Wonderful to behold from outside, awful to experience from within.
What kind of obsession produces an effort, not just to complete Pokemon Platinum, which after all was sold to kids with the expectation that they would be able to beat it eventually. No, what about an effort to finish every possible game of Pokemon Platinum, using a script that works on every possible random seed, of over four billion, that the game can generate? And also operates mostly on “Nuzlocke Challenge” constraints, where any defeated Pokemon (here, after the first battle) have to be released? But that’s okay, because after that first fight, the player is never defeated?
That this is possible at all is because of Pokemon Platinum’s use of a PRNG, a pseudo-random number generator. While figuring out how, mathematically, to beat over four billion possible games is a formidable challenge, it’s still better than beating every possible conceivable random sequence of events, which can’t ever be done conclusively.
So, that’s what MartSnack did. They found out how to swim through the deep-yet-discrete sea of probability to obtain just the Pokemon, and Pokemon stats, they needed to complete the game, regardless of any random event the game could throw at them, with the same sequence of button presses. It’s a journey that requires frequent synchronization, to make sure no one possible play breaks free of the others, sending that branch of fate down a rogue path. How is this possible at all, I leave it to you to discover in their Youtube video, an interesting hour and five minutes found by MeFi user (and former owner) cortex, here:
Fact: even after the disastrous life of the Wii-U, Miis still exist on the Nintendo Switch, and even though a lot less fuss is made about them now, there are still games that support them.
There are also games that used to support them but no longer do. The version of Super Mario Galaxy on Super Mario 3D All-Stars doesn’t let you select a system Mii to use as the file icon. You’re limited to one of the Mario characters provided! It’s a shame that. But, Nintendo Switch Sports, Smash Ultimate, and of course Miitopia supports them, as do four other games on the platform.
I’ve actually been through the process explained in the below video, by CJCat, which involves using Amiibo to transfer Miis over one by one from a Wii-U that had a Mii collection brought over using the Wii import channel. We played a lot of Wii, and it’s nice to know all the goofy characters we made, and the memories they carry, are on the Switch, even if few games use them any more. I hope the Switch 2 doesn’t forget about them, and that it makes them easier to bring over!
The lawsuit was really about Nintendo trying to stamp out the game rental business in the US, which they were largely successful at in Japan. Cartridge manufacturers were genuinely frightened of rentals cutting into their profits, and resorted to measures like increasing the difficulty of games in the US market to prevent players from completing games on a single rental and losing out on sales. Howard Lincoln of Nintendo of America called game rental “…nothing less than commercial rape.” While the Software Publishers Alliance (SPA) managed to get legislation passed that outlawed the rental of computer software, video games were separately defined and rental allowed to continue.
They sought out any legal means they could to make game rentals less attractive. Manuals were one way to do this. While rental stores couldn’t easily copy the games in order rent our more copies, it was fairly easy to make a good-enough reproduction of a manual using a copy machine. Nintendo sued Blockbuster over the practice, which was eventually settled out of court, but Blockbuster sent a letter to the four stores they had who were accused of the practice telling them to stop.
If you were around at that time, you might remember that for a time rented games would sometimes come with their own small makeshift manuals, sometimes taking the form of an adhesive sheet stuck to the plastic case. It seems these were a small industry that saw the lack of durable instructions provided with games as a little economic niche they could take advantage of.
The lack of manuals supplied with games may have been the reason for a weird quirk on one of Nintendo’s games. The game Startropics has one infamous place where the game asks the player to enter a code from materials supplied with the game. There was a sheet of paper that came with boxed retail copies of the game, an Infocom-style “feelie,” that if soaked in water revealed a code (747) that had to be entered into the game at one point to continue. The code wasn’t revealed anywhere in the game, so players without the sheet couldn’t progress.
Interestingly, while the WiiU Virtual Console version of Startropics has an online manual that reveals the code, the Switch online version has no manual, and leaves players stranded there unless they look up the answer online.
Now that the release of the game is some distance behind us, it seems apparent that, after all the videos about death machines and Korok torture have run their course, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t have as much meme longevity as Breath of the Wild had. This is probably because BotW got some of the categories of video (like harassing Yiga) out of peoples’ systems, and also how brightly the Zonai device roundup compilation flame burnt for a while. Even Wolf Link’sminimalist run collection has slowed to a halt lately.
This is why I was pleased to see a video appear yesterday from MiahTRT both telling and elaborating upon how many Bokoblins there are in Tears of the Kingdom. The brief answer is 3,509 in the various tiers. Some of them can advance in power through the game due to the game’s hidden experience mechanic, a carryover from Breath of the Wild, that causes the monsters in the game to become more powerful depending on your actions in the game. (It does not increase Link’s power, although it may cause stronger items to generate.)
It’s a short video, at about four minutes, and unlike many videos seeking to stretch themselves out to increase ad revenue, it gets right to the point in answering its question. Thanks, MiahTRT!
It’s true! Thanetian Gaming on Youtube has an 18-minute video about Atari Games’ neglected classic Rampart. Remember back in September when I posted a strategy guide that no one asked for over four days? Judging by his video he could stand to read it, but no matter, I’ll accept anyone talking about my favorite arcade game in a positive light!
Sometimes I feel like I should put a content warning here when the technical level of a post is higher than usual. This one would probably be a five out of five for geekery. It’s a video from NESHacker on counting score on the Nintendo Entertainment System. But I don’t want to discourage you from watching it! It’s nine minutes long, and it contains a definition of the term double dabble.
Human-readable numbers are tracked by computers in a number of different ways. Nowadays we basically just do a printf or some version of it, but on a 1 megahertz platform, optimization really matters. It’s easy to think of computers as being impossibly fast, but in truth speed only ever counts relative to the efficiency of the algorithm you use. Computers are fast, but they aren’t all that fast.
One of the big tradeoffs in processor design is, fewer complex instructions that do a lot but take a lot of cycles, and processor complexity, to execute, or many simple instructions, each doing little and being relatively simple, and not needing a complex processor design to implement.
The 6502 microprocessor generally follows the latter design philosophy. It made some important tradeoffs to keep costs down. For example, it doesn’t have hardware that can multiply arbitrary numbers together. It relies on the programmer, or else a library author, to use the instructions given to code their own multiplication algorithm, if they need one. The result is going to be slower, probably, that if the chip had the circuits to do this automatically in silicon, but it reduced the cost of the chip, basically allowing more to be made, or else increasing the profits for the manufacturer.
Personally I’m a fan of just storing the score as a series of digits that match up to their positions in the character set. Gain 1,000 points? Just bump the 1000s-place up by one, and if it goes past 9, subtract 10 and bump the 10,000s place. That’s a tried-and-true system that many games use, and works well if all you ever have to do is add numbers. Comparing values, like for detecting extra life award levels, make things slightly more complex, but not by much. There’s sometimes other factors involved though, and that may explain why Super Mario Bros. uses different systems for its counters, as explained by NESHacker.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
People remember the DK Rap, the theme song from Donkey Kong 64 back on the Nintendo 64. It’s certainly memorable, and arguably iconic, although most would agree it’s not great as a rap? It was written by George Andreas (who wrote and sang the lyrics) and Grant Kirkhope (who composed the music).
We’re referred to it before here in a Sunday Sundry about brentalfloss’ excellent (but very dark) 2018 parody version, which kept most of the music the same. Well here’s an update that’s changes the music and lyrics, with the music from original composer Kirkhope, and the words written and sung by rapper Substantial, and by all rights it’s a much better song. Hear for yourself (3 minutes), it’s (puts on monocle) remarkably funky:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
I don’t like heaping more views on a video that’s already got 2.6 million, but it’s not always easy finding new ones, so here (33 seconds). I know how Link feels.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
BitFinity, aka Matthew Taranto, the guy who made the long-running webcomic Brawl in the Family, has kept busy since with making Youtube songs. In addition a number featuring Waluigi, and one with Aeris from Final Fantasy VI, most recently he’s made one starring Ganondorf complaining about people who spell his name wrong, and who also takes the opportunity to dress down peoples’ issues with game language and pronunciation more generally. (3 minute)
