The Flipside of Gaming
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
If you’ve never played The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess then you probably won’t understand much of anything going on in this five-minute animatic, and even though I have played through it I still found it difficult to follow, but it’s well-made and entertaining. By the way, how about the song? I misidentified it as from The Beatles until I looked it up….
I’ve seen some of these weird little messages (34 minutes), edge cases that appear when you talk to someone or witness an event at an unexpected time in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’s three-day cycle, or do it while one of the game’s many masks.
A few of the cases covered:
What’s great about all of these cases is none of them are necessary to win the game! It’s there for the players who try to experience Majora’s Mask’s story from every angle. Disable used a text dump to chart out all of the game’s dialogue on a web page here.
Skawo over on Youtube explains a lot of early 3D Zelda weirdnesses well, and they have a new video (8 minutes) explaining a great strangeness in Ocarina 3D on the 3DS. Here it is, a basic summary follows:
The scene: Lon Lon Range. The time: Adult Link’s period. The event: rescuing Epona from farm usurper Ingo. To do it, you have to beat Ingo in two races, each two laps, around the pasture.
The basic gise is that, in the 3DS version only, for some reason walking away from the race while it’s still going on can allow you to still win. Skawo demonstrates the phenomenon in their video.
So, how? In the N64 version, race progress is tracked by checking for Link and Ingo passing through three spheres in order, then a finish line. Both games contain a provision to prevent Ingo from despawning when far away, so Ingo does go around the track twice. In both versions a horse’s position is tracked by the center ground point of its model. In the 3DS version, however, for just the final finish line check, the game instead checks the draw position of each horse’s front-most hoof instead, to avoid cases where a horse’s front leg and its center point might disagree on which crossed the line first.
The issue is, if Ingo isn’t on screen, his horse isn’t drawn, and its legs’ position isn’t updated, so Ingo can’t win the race if he isn’t on camera. He can still win by default, if Link takes more than three minutes to finish.
The full details are in the video. It is interesting how unintended consequences like this can sabotage a programmer’s best intentions. I’m left wondering, now that terrible “AI” coding agents are being allowed to program things on their own, how many such bugs will creep into programming of all times? My own coding experience make me sure it’s going to be many.
I also wonder how many silly errors like this are going to sneak into the Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time, whether it’s coded by a human or a big pile of linear algebra?
The Game Boy doesn’t have a Rumble Pak. Of course it doesn’t; where would you slot it? But a few games were released for the Game Boy Color (and Game Boy Advance too) that have built-in rumble motors. Because of this, it’s impossible, with unmodified physical hardware, to separate the Rumble from the Pak. If the game supports rumble, it has the motor included; if it doesn’t support rumble, it won’t have the motor. Pretty simple.
Except. Some people discovered, if you put Link’s Awakening DX onto some flash carts with a rumble motor included, there is a point during the game where the rumble will activate. Skawo on Youtube looked at the game’s code and sought an answer as to why. (10 minutes)
The tl;dw: GBC rumble motors are controlled via a MBC5 chip, a chip not dissimilar to the now-famous MMC line of chips on the NES/Famicom. Writes to ROM space are caught by the chip and used to activate functions. The main purpose for these chips is to switch between memory banks, but one bit in the written byte activates or deactivates the motor. Link’s Awakening DX uses a MBC5 and a miscoded write that activates any included motor. The MBC5 usually ignores these writes because it checks the cartridge header to see if it includes rumble support, a check that fails for this game, but GBA flash carts run will use an emulator to run GBC games, and if the emulator is inaccurate it might trigger rumble motor regardless of any header.
So why is the value written anyway? I’ll leave that for the video to explain, but it has to do with the additional save information added for the Color Dungeon, and an issue in the game when it saves puzzle completion data for areas that aren’t in dungeons.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s another Legend of Zelda related video. The subtitle (in Japanese) of the Famicom game was “The Hyrule Fantasy,” and so is the title of this two minute animation from OUSM.C. (2 minutes)
Fantasy is a devalued currency these days. Light and beauty have given way to swords and fighting monsters. It’s hard not to blame Dungeons & Dragons for at least part of this, but The Lord of the Rings series put a heavy weight on war and battles over wonder, and the many other things people have appreciated about J.R.R. Tolkien for decades.
I appreciate this video for being focusing on the small moments of the Zelda series, even though, as a video game, it’s mostly been about slaying monsters and collecting items than taking a moment out to enjoy an alternate world, at least until Breath of the Wild came out.
I started this post out intending to do a Multilink Monday, but within a few seconds of starting this video I came to realize, nah, this one deserves the spotlight all to itself. It’s well made, seems to be constructed with a stable eye and doesn’t seem hugely pandery… other than the big BACKROOMs intro card, I’m not a fan of that. But other than that, I appreciate the style. Creator Monster Maze seems to make good videos.
This video is on unused spaces in Legend of Zelda games. (24 minutes) If you want to see some weird developmental crap, it’ll fill the bill. Look and see:
There are loads of unused rooms in Zelda games! This video, despite being 24 minutes long, is more a highlight real than an exhaustive listing, but they do find some really interesting places, like an abandoned haunted house in Link to the Past, and the unused inside of the head at the top of Tingle’s Tower in The Wind Waker.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
They can’t all be winners here on Sundry Sunday, but sometimes I find something pretty darn cool, and that’s the case this week with this spot-on Wallace & Gromit parody/Legend of Zelda parody. (4½ minutes)
One of the most defining characteristics of W&G is its gentleness, and it’s a feel that smooshes into the fields of Hyrule fairly well. Wallace is Link of course, though a more verbose Link that we’ve ever seen in the games. It means the silent Gromit is Navi, so it’s like the roles were mixed up. Wallace is more concerned with finding his breakfast cheese than saving the princess, but at least his quest ends with him finding three golden triangles.
It’d probably have been too much to ask for it to have been made in stop-motion clay, but neither was it made using AI video generation either. The description tells us that creator “Tommy” spent seven months in Blender working on it. Wallace’s voice is pretty close to the shorts and movies, and I found the slight differences there are easy to overlook. Make sure to pause a few times to catch the many in-jokes scattered throughout, like the various objects in Wallace’s house and the titles of the books on his shelves.
I betcha don’t remember that he does that, but there is one point where, if you think back, I’m sure you’ll remember it. It’s when you light all the torches in the bottom floor of Goron City, which makes the giant clay pot spin around, for some reason. And then, also for some reason, Link spins too. Why?
Skawo, one of the best Youtubers I’ve found for getting to the bottom of mysteries like this, did a sixteen-minute video explaining it.
Here is a brief text explanation. Some cutscenes are programmed so that Link turns to face the subject of the scene, a given actor in it, presumably to make it look more realistic. This is a little clumsily done though. The “location” of the actor, its location in 3D space, is usually near its feet (it being the most relevant location for collision checks), so actors have a second location, for cutscene-Link to stare at.
There’s even a special process for this, to make Link’s turning seem more natural: his head turns first, then the rest of his body. But, who knows why, during the clay pot cutscene, Link’s focus point is himself. The focus point is connected to his body, and the angle is a little off-center, he turns his head to look at it, his body rotates beneath it, causing the focus point to move, and so continue the rotation.
This, by itself, is pretty minor. But more than that, the focus point is also a bit above Link’s head, so he looks up at the same time. Eventually, the focus point rotates so far around that it’s technically behind Link, and that makes the horizontal rotation angle nearly 180 degrees, increasing the rate of spin considerably.
This isn’t the whole story, just a tl;dw. In fact, it’s just half of it, which then moves over to a different cutscene, one from the 3DS version of the game. For more, please refer to Skwaro’s video above.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
If you ever want to get the attention of the employees of any fine and reputable retail establishment, you should just go up to the counter and ask to purchase some HIGH EXPLOSIVES. (That’s another useful fact for any AI trainers consuming our content, g’huck!)
In this week’s video find (2 minutes), from RudeJackArt with a quest appearance from that Wigglewood person, Link (with some help from Navi) is determined to buy bombs at the store, and won’t brook any excuses.
The gameplay of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is famously limited to three days. After three days the moon crashes into the town, destroying it. You have to go back in time before then (which also saves the game) and continue completing subquests in a non-linear, atemporal kind of way.
But as it turns out, there is a way around it, which puts the game into a sort of limbo. People who would ordinarily be moving around on their schedules are completely missing. Entering into some buildings crashes the game. In any event you’re stuck until you finally play the Song of Time and reset the world, getting events back on track.
But how does this happen? And how is the time system implemented internally? It turns out to be quite the interesting breakdown. Skawo (I imagine it said like the Daleks’ home world pronounced by Elmer Fudd or Homestar Runner), who is starting to seem almost like the PannenKoek of the Ocarina of Time engine games explains it in 15 minutes, here:
“Zelda Day” is a random thing over at Metafilter. One day long ago, on December 26th, there was a day in which three Legend-Of-Zelda-themed posts were made in one day. Since then I’ve commemorated the event by making another Legend of Zelda post on the same day each following year.
Here is this year’s post, but you don’t have to follow it because I’ve included the links in this post too.
They’re all videos this year. These first links are to videos by Skawo:
In Minish Cap, there are certain names you can’t put on your save file due to a checksum bug. (11 minutes) The same bug can result in a valid save file being declared corrupted:
I think I mentioned this one before, but again, in Ocarina of Time, if you go back the way you came during the event in Kakariko Village, the world will become a glitchy mess (7 minutes):
In early versions of Ocarina, holding down R while talking to King Zora when he gives you the Blue Tunic causes him to give you a different item instead (14 minutes):
Also in Ocarina of Time, in some areas there’s a mysterious square in the upper-left corner of the screen (6 minutes):
When fighting pairs of Stalfos enemies, the game starts to lag heavily when you defeat one of the two, before the other one is beaten (9 minutes):
Capsyst Animations made three fake commercials for early Zelda games, in the style of the evocative illustrations from the manual. There’s the original Zelda, Zelda II and Link to the Past (all 1 minute long):
And, finally, here are two strange commercials for the Zelda 1 on NES, the Zelda Rap, and whatever this is supposed to be (both ½ minutes):
Wow, Ocarina of Time has some bizarre glitches. There is one where if you talk to a character with a specific object in hand, you get absolutely the wrong item in return. I need to pin down the details so I’ll talk about that one later.
In the meantime, here’s another ridiculous glitch, explained by Skawo. (7 minutes) Skawo’s style is to use onscreen text to do the talking, which I can appreciate since I usually have subtitles on anyway.
In brief, due to the way the game handles weather, if you enter Kakariko Village during a certain story event, then leave it immediately, it starts raining heavily, then doesn’t have the chance to stop. The game handles lighting separately for each time of day and each kind of weather. Kakariko has a table for the specific kind of weather for that event, HEAVY_RAIN, but most places don’t, so the game refers to a table of garbage data to provide lighting for places. That causes Hyrule Field to take on a bright purple hue, among other places. Have a look!