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….

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A few of the cases covered:

• Tatl the fairy’s information on a couple of the bosses changes as you progress through their fights.
• The guards blocking the exits to Clock Town usually use the presence of your sword to determine whether they will let you leave, but if your sword was stolen or is being forged they’ll notice and let you leave anyway. They also give you different hints on which dungeon to do next.
• The Astronomer has special dialogue if you speak to him as a Goron or a Zora.
• The residents of Clock Town each have their own little story of how they’re handling their impending destruction. The Swordsman especially has interesting reactions that change as the clock ticks down.
• The Swordsman also, like the Happy Mask Salesman, has a reaction to every mask you can wear to his shop. The lady in the Treasure Chest game and the both the proprietor of the Trading Post and his employee have unique reactions to some of the masks.
• If Deku Link can shoot bubbles they can play the archery game, not even needing a bow!

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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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):

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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!

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First video (beginning to the end of the second dungeon + extras):

Second video (Jabu-Jabu’s Belly through to the end of the Forest Temple):

Third video (the Fire Temple, the Water Temple and the fetch quest to get Biggoron’s Sword):

Fourth video (The Shadow and Spirit Temples and the end):

Is that not enough? Rival channel U Can Beat Video Games has been churning through all of Final Fantasy VI (a.k.a. III, it’s complicated), having done five videos so far with one left to go, with videos ranging in length between 3⅓ to 4 hours: Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four – Part Five.

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

This week’s subject: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

The first LoZ didn’t have much ROM space for whimsy, but every Zelda game afterward made sure to spare some space, and time, for goofy characters.

Zelda II had Error and Bagu (a.k.a. “Bug”). Link to the Past had that bat that “cursed” you with a doubled magic meter. Link’s Awakening, basically, had everyone. And so forth.

One of the darkest Zeldas is Twilight Princess, the story of a lost race of Hyrule that was sealed away in a parallel dimension by its oh-so-helpful goddesses. But it’s also the game with Agatha the Insect Princess. And it’s the game with Malo.

After an unfortunate fate happens to Kakariko’s shopkeeper, the town’s shop stands empty. Around that time Link rescues three children from Moblins, and the youngest is the surly Malo, whose baby-like appearance and stern expression contrast hilariously with each other.

As it turns out, Malo has plans for that empty shop, for when Link visits at a later time, it has turned into… Malo Mart (31 seconds):

Malo Mart is where Link can buy the Hylian Shield, but also the Magic Armor, a hugely powerful piece of protective equipment that converts damage Link received into rupee costs. As long as your money holds out, even the final boss can’t scratch Link, and, somehow, it’s all thanks to Malo.

In the half-minute video above from Patrick Alfred, Malo himself doesn’t actually appear, although that is his face is plastered all over the outside. The shopkeeper is an employee; Malo himself can’t see over the counter. I assure you though, the music in the video is directly from the game, in all its dubious glory.

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

Nathorz is an animator who has made several videos that took game character noises and put them into humorous contexts. To date he’s made videos with the sounds of Luigi, Kirby, Wario, Yoshi and Donkey Kong. The longest of any of these videos is 1½ minutes, so they’re not going to eat up your day.

Most recently he made a video, again just a minute and a half long, with noises from various incarnations of Link and Zelda. Warning: this includes the old Zelda cartoon from the Super Mario Bros Super Show. Additional warning: includes a cameo from “Suaveamente Ganondorf” at the very end.

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

The things we post here on Sundays tend to vary a lot in quality, but there aren’t many vids that are tonally pitch-perfect as this mash-up between the old Legend of Zelda cartoon, from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, and Beavis and Butthead (10 minutes), from KhalidSMShalin.

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The video’s a bit padded with injokes and gimmicks, but beneath it all the bug is really interesting. Many games have checks to ensure the validity of save data, but the developers of both games implemented theirs in an odd way, calculating a 16-bit checksum for the file data twice, once by adding and once by subtracting, saving them both, and them when the File Select screen is setting up adding them to each other and checking for zero with the negative bit set (the high-order bit). It usually works, except when the checksum is exactly zero, which happens one in 65,536 times.

When that occurs, the total will be zero without the negative sign, which will be detected falsely as corrupted save data. As luck would have it, naming your character “God” in the European version of GBA Link to the Past will trigger the bug, and make it so you can’t create the file. But the 1-in-65536 chance comes up every time you save and exit. (The file check is made upon loading the File Select screen, so just saving with a checksum of 0 won’t trigger it; if the player saves later in the same play session, non-zero checksums will be written over the bad ones.)

1-in-65536 is a rare event, but it’s not extremely rare, and it’s absolutely the case that over the years many players have had their games declared corrupted and made unloadable. If a player saves their game, say, 20 times through a playthrough, then that’s about a 1-in-3250 chance of losing all their progress, and both games sold much more than 3,250 copies.

Skawo demonstrates the bug in action in The Minish Cap here, in the peocess responding to some naysayers (10 minutes):

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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:

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:

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On Romhack Thursdays, we bring you interesting finds from the world of game modifications.

Every GDQ, I find out about several things that I feel are worth telling all of you about. It happened once again this year, and that’s why I’m now pointing you to an invaluable speedrunning resource, the Ocarina of Time Practice Rom.

Of course, I don’t think you’ll want to speedrun it. But if you ever want to test something out in the game and don’t want to play through the whole of OoT to do it, it could be very useful. It’s distributed in the form of a patch program, available for Windows, Mac or Linux, and you’ll have to do a bit of command-line typing to run it. And you’ll have to supply the rom file yourself, of course, but that’s the case with all the offerings proffered by our sunglasses-wearing green friend up above. The makers offer support for the Virtual Console release of Ocarina of Time, but if you choose to play it in real hardware, you should know that the Practice Rom requires the 4 MB Expansion RAM upgrade for your N64. If you came by your Nintendo 64 unit second-hand, open the little hatch on the top of the console: if the little module in there has a red top, that’s the “Expansion Pak,” as Nintendo called it. If it has a black top, then you don’t have the expansion, just the “Jumper Pak” that came standard. If there’s just a hole in there, then you don’t have either, and your system won’t work!

Let’s assume that you get it all working, and both have a new copy of the Practice Rom and a way to run it. How does it work, and what does it do? Once it’s started up, it’ll take you to the game’s title screen like usual. Press Start and you’ll be at the File Select screen as usual. Enter a name and start the file, and you’ll even be taken to the intro cutscene.

But no one says you’ll have to wait through it. Hold the R button and press L, and a menu will appear:

From here, you can use the Control Pad, or whatever your controller’s version of it is, to navigate this menu, while you continue to play the game, in real-time, with the Control Stick and other buttons. Pressing L selects things from the menu, and R goes back up a level.

Is this useful? Well, maybe? Or maybe not. Are video games useful? I present it mostly as a curiosity. If you just want to play the game then mostly it gets in the way. It’s not a randomizer or remix, it’s just straight Ocarina, but with these extra things added. It has a full user’s manual on its website, and to make decent use of it you’ll probably need to spend some time with it. Check it out, if you’re of a mind.

OoT Practice Rom (practicerom.com)

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

Last week I put off Sundry Sunday to let you know AGDQ was about to begin! So this week I’ve brought multiple videos, all with the theme of looking at a Legend of Zelda game from the point of view of the usual-rescuee, Z-girl herself. No, not the one in the green suit! What are you saying?

In Wind Waker, Zelda gets to take a fairly active role in the story, until you (and she!) find out that she’s actually Zelda, and then gets stuck in hidden secret sunken Hyrule Castle for the second half of the game, boo! What did she do down there? K_Grovyle gives us a look (2 1/2 minutes):

Of course the newest Zelda game as of this writing actually has Zelda as the protagonist for the first time, allowing her the kind of malicious gaming shenanigans usually reserved to Link (and to confirm, the one in the green suit is Link, not Zelda, honest). jjjj4rd presents an animation of her usual hobbies while wandering the fields and wilderness (3 minutes):

And some more (3 minutes)!

What’s that you say? Zelda is actually the main character of all the other games? Zelda’s a boy you’re telling me? Why that’s not true, how could you even think that, I thought it was obvious, I–

Oh. Okay then, I stand corrected. Zelda’s the boy. Carry on.

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But, is the purchase of keys ever necessary? Usually Zelda 1 gives you many more keys than you need. Even in the Second Quest, which tightens the screws, you can usually get by if you just make sure to clear every room and bomb some walls.

But consider the worst-case scenario. What if you open just the wrong doors? Is it possible, if you waste keys on rooms that aren’t on the critical path to completing the game, to make it so you have to resort to buying keys in shops?

In an 11-minute video, “TheRetroDude,” as he styles himself, examines this question. tl;dw: not in the First Quest, but it’s technically possible to soft-lock yourself, unless you resort to commercially-provided keys, in the Second Quest, if you’re very injudicious about the doors you open. Here:

Trying to Get Stuck in Zelda 1 (Youtube, 11 minutes)

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If you don’t know anything about this, you are truly blessed by Din, Nayru and Farore. In summary, Eiji Aonuma, Nintendo’s overseer of the Legend of Zelda game series, has declared that almost all of the game in the long series fit into a massive set of timelines. Not a single timeline, because Ocarina of Time had a time travel plot, and that gave them the opportunity to split the series continuity, from that point, into three branches.

Most of this was described in Hyrule Historia book, one of three books that Dark Horse Comics put out, official tomes explaining much abo/ut the series and its canonical sequence of events. They also put up a website with the gist of things. Chronologically, the first four games in the series, unbelievably, are Skyward Sword, The Minish Cap(!), the Four Swords game that came with the GBA remake of Link to the Past (!!), then Ocarina of Time.

After that, there are three timelines: one in which Link didn’t defeat Ganon at the end of Ocarina of time, and the split timelines of Adult and Child link in that game. Why Ocarina gets special treatment for Link losing and none of the other games I can’t definitively say, except that it probably gives them more room into which to slot the series’ continued proliferation.

If Ganon in OoT wins, we get the timeline of A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons, A Link Between Worlds (which is essentially a direct sequel to aLttP), Tri-Force Heroes (remember that), and then, at the end of this line, the originals themselves: The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

Then we have two lines for Adult Link’s time and Child Link’s time. For Link the Elder, there’s Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, which is interesting since Adult Link creates a legacy where his descendants are all heroes as children, and indeed Hyrule is destroyed at the end of Wind Waker (I hope I’m not spoiling anything), Ganondorf is definitely killed, and the following two games take place in a new land. I’d love to see that era explored further, but we haven’t heard anything from it since the DS. “Meanwhile” Link the Younger has Majora’s Mask, Twilight Princess and Four Swords Adventures.

You might notice some interesting absences. What about Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom? People who have played all the way through those will notice a history that doesn’t jibe with the others, and the Triforce is hardly seen in either of them! In it the Sheikah is technically advanced, Hyrule has a history of technology, and Ganondorf arose all over again, not even to mention those Zonai people! What giveth?

Aonuma has said that those games don’t place on any of the current timelines! And Hyrule Warriors is its own alternate dimension, and the BotW-themed Hyrule Warriors sequel is probably also an alternate universe.

Until Echoes of Wisdom, the most recent game, those were the forefront of the Zelda metachronology, and seems to indicate that Nintendo was forging the series afresh. But on a different chronology page than the one I linked above, Echoes of Wisdom has been placed on the timeline, as part of the Hero is Defeated branch coming off of Ocarina of Time, after Tri-Force Heroes, but before The Legend of Zelda.

All of this is largely meaningless, of course. Some games refer to past games, but just as many forge ahead with only incidental callbacks. Aonuma has said that they don’t really pay much attention to where a game will fit into the timeline when making it, which explains why BotW and TotK throw away all that continuity, other than some familiar place names. But now we know that, somewhere in Nintendo, there is a poor shlub whose job it is to try to make it all fit together, and that they threw up their hands with the two open world games.

A thankless task. And who knows how long it can even be kept up? Eventually they’ll end up pulling a Castlevania, reboot the whole damn thing, and where from there? Crisis on Infinite Hyrules? Secret Imprisoning Wars? Nintendo52? I don’t even like to speculate upon it.

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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:

Moving In (Youtube, 2 1/2 minutes)

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That’s all this time, but if you’re interested in this information it’s a lot to get through. They have information on character names, map names, the shrine Monks, monsters, items and quite a bit more! And if this isn’t that interesting to you? Well, we’re a daily blog here, so check back tomorrow!

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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!

How Many Bokoblins Are There In TOTK? (Youtube, four minutes)

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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.

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Reading this, I was reminded of https://zeldawiki.wiki/wiki/Impa, Zelda’s nursemaid/servant, who was a similar kind of manual-only backstory figure until Ocarina of Time, where Impa not only appeared as an important NPC, but was revealed to be of the secretive Sheikah tribe, and had ninja skills to boot. She looked a lot different from the aged figure in The Legend of Zelda’s manual.

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

It’s not always easy to find these kinds of videos? Youtube’s hated algorithm is heavily influenced by the last things you watched, so if you get in a mood to watch restorations of old arcade games, it doesn’t take many of those until your homepage is loaded with them, to the exclusion of other things.

And honestly, who beside me is going to link to videos like this, an animation of Link in Breath of the Wild, in the much appreciated by fans Gerudo Outfit, breakdancing out in the desert, with unexpected accompaniment? That’s what Sundays here are for folks. Showing you the things that Youtube doesn’t want you to see, if only by accident (30 seconds).

When you’re attacking Vah Naboris but the music is really good (Youtube, animated, 30 seconds)

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Here’s our post on Part 1, and here’s a link to its video.

Looygi Bros. tends to make a series of videos on topics, so there will probably be a Part 3, and more. Instead of linking them all individually, I may wait for a bit and collect them all into one post, or maybe even add them to this post retroactively.

Here are the glitches in Part 2 listed out and explicated:

1. Super Mario Bros, jump over the flagpole in World 1-1: Requires time-consuming setup, and useless for saving time, as the result is Mario can’t finish the level, but it does work.
2. More invisible ladders in Donkey Kong’s Ramps level: There are more invisible ladders than the one demonstrated in Part 1, and these aren’t caught by traps! The current World Record recorded by the servers uses it, in fact, making it an essential strategy for anyone trying to beat it.
3. Kirby Credits Warp: One of the levels in the game has a massive trick, where Kirby can get inside a wall, and if they have the Stone ability (possible to get with Mix), can crash the game, and if the Start button is pressed on the same frame as Stone activating, the NES cart jumps straight to the credits! The crash however takes the NWC software back to the selection menu, and the Start button is disabled, so this one’s impossible to do.
4. Legend of Zelda moving through blocks: A frequently-used trick in speedruns, it’s not caught by the NWC software but there’s no place where it’s useful for saving time.
5. Super Mario Bros. 4-2 Wrong Warp: This is an alternate way to get to the 8-7-6 Warp Zone without having to reveal the hidden blocks, then hit and climb the vine, by going down the coin pipe shortly after without scrolling the screen far enough to change the secret area destination. Seems to be impossible to make work in NWC, as the game rewinds when the vine block is scrolled off-screen.
6. Super Mario Bros. 8-4 Wrong Warp: Done under similar conditions to the 4-2 wrong warp, this one is caught by the emulator and rewinds the trial.
7. Surviving Timeout in Metroid’s Escape Sequence: If Samus uses the final elevator with the right timing at the end of the escape, the explosion happens, but she survives to complete her mission anyway. It’s possible in NWC, but results in the longest-possible time to complete the trial, so it’s only useful to show off.
8. Super Mario Bros. 8-2 Bullet Bill Flagpole Animation Skip: If Mario bounces off of a low-flying Bullet Bill right at the end of 8-2, it’s possible to trigger the flagpole, but leave Mario before the block on which the pole rests. This results in him walking into it endlessly, but it triggers the level completion sequence, and means he doesn’t have to raise the flag or walk to the castle. It’s really only a slight time save, but it does work in the NWC version of the game.

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To summarize them:

1. Minus World: the trap occurs when Mario tries to slide through the wall at the end of World 1-2.
2. In Donkey Kong, it’s possible to climb down the first ladder, wrap around the screen, and end up on the girder right below the goal. They caught this one.
3. Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) Fast Carpet: with two carpets spawned, you can travel extra fast. This one didn’t get caught, but the set-up time to use it makes its use in the challenge prohibitive.
4. Wrapping the screen in The Legend of Zelda. This is one of my least favorite glitches honestly. Nintendo caught it, you can’t glitch around the screen horizontally nor get Link into the top-of-screen status area. (I also dislike the term “HUD” for these areas. Dammit Jim, it’s a video game not a jet fighter.)
5. The “door jump” glitch in Metroid. This lets you use a door to get Samus inside the blocks that make up the edges of the screen, from there you can, depending on the situation, either wrap around the screen vertically or explore “secret worlds” created by interpreting random cartridge data as terrain. This one’s trapped.
6. Super Mario 2 double jump. I didn’t know about this one! In some circumstances when you’re near an enemy, characters can jump in mid air. This one is both not trapped, and actually useful in the challenge!
7. Super Mario 3 Fortress skip. In similar circumstances to passing through the wall in Super Mario Bros. to get to the Minus World, you can pass through a wall midway through the fortress to skip an area and go straight to the boss. This one’s trapped, probably checking for the same kind of situation as the Minus World trick.
8. Super Mario Bros. wall jump. Not trapped, and conceivably useful in the World 8-4 completion challenge to get into the elevated pipe.
9. Kid Icarus fortress 1 shortcut. There’s a way to glitch through a wall early in the route through the fortress that takes you almost to the end. This one is trapped, but it’s triggered, not when you get through the wall, but when you go through the room’s exit. It probably makes sure you go through all the essential rooms in order.
10. Super Mario Bros. 2 cave skip. It’s a way to glitch through a wall so you don’t have to wait for a bomb to explode. It’s tricky but possible, you end up taking damage to get through it though.
11. Super Mario Bros. 2 item attachment. A complex trick that lets you get items into areas where they aren’t intended to go. Technically this is untrapped and usable. In conjunction with the cave skip trick, it’s possible to kill Birdo with a Shy Guy, potentially with one throw instead of having to wait for three eggs to throw back at her. Looygi Bros was unable to get the whole trick to work in the World Championships software, but offers the possibility of it working to whoever can chain together all the necessary techniques.

I find it interesting that the tricks were disabled through traps instead of fixing their games, they seem to have enough technical know-how to know how the glitches work to check for them in the emulation layer, but maybe fixing them was deemed against the spirit of the game, or they didn’t want to risk changing the game’s essential behavior?

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