The Flipside of Gaming
It’s a big searchable database of a lot of interviews the people who have made Legend of Zelda games! You can browse by selections of quotes, by game, by publication, by interview topic, or by job rule. It’s a pretty plain site to look at, but there’s a lot of gold to find there if you’re at all curious about this long-running and immensely popular series.
One useful feature the site offers is pre-made images of some quotes (sadly, not all) suitable for including in Twitter posts! Here’s a few:
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Kenneth Seward Jr. at Kotaku tells us about things he wished he knew before starting Multiversus, the Space Jam: A New Legacy of fighting games. Besides that Steven and Garnet are best characters? Not due to gameplay properties, just because.
In further X is the Y of Z news, at Polygon, Mike Mahardy makes the claim that Risk of Rain 2 is the Super Mario 64 of (their word) roguelikes. Blogmate rodneylives once did a Q&A with the Risk of Rain folks back at Game Developer, when it was Gamasutra. It’s cool!
Kite Stenbuck of SiliconEra confirms Nintendo’s confirmation that the 3DS and Wii-U eShops will be closing in March 2023. This is further after they stop accepting cash for points at the end of August. Yay for forced obsolescence! Wait, no, not yay! Boo, in fact!
Next, at Eurogamer, Victoria Kennedy tells us that Stray‘s robot language has been deciphered. I mean, this is a surprise? It’s just a substitution cipher. People do those for fun! It’s not exactly the Codex Seraphinianus, is it? No word on whether cat language has been decoded yet, in its infinite complexity. (MEOW = “Gimmie food!”)
IGN: Logan Plant posts about a split-screen mod for Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In fairness, they’re stretching the definition of mod a lot with this one: “of course” it’s not playable on console. It does link to an old 2017 post of fun Breath of the Wild mods that include a playable Waluigi.
And Wes Fenlon at PC Gamer tells us about changes made to the upcoming remake of Tactics Ogre, many of which undo changes made to the previous remake of Tactics Ogre. I wish someone would remake my old Tactics Ogre Disk 2 on PS1, which snapped clean in half when I sat on it. I cried for fifteen minutes.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Aaron Greenbaum at Den of Geek investigates, what was the last NES game released? Covers multiple territories, and both licensed and unlicensed titles, although in that later case recent releases stretch the premise considerably.
This might be our first link to comingsoon.net, reporting that Nintendo has purchased the studio that animated those charming Pikmin shorts from back in the Wii-U era. [Reminders: first, second, third] Maybe we should save those links for Sunday? Maybe we’ll just slip them in again some week.
We have a bit of animosity towards Cracked for how they treated several of their prior writers, although that did eventually result in the creation of both Behind The Bastards and Some More News, which are creator-owned. Still, bad scene Cracked. Currently working for them (for how long?) is Eli Yudin, and they wrote a list of 15 Gloriously Weird Genesis games. It contains ToeJam & Earl, Wiz & Liz, Rocket Knight Adventures, The Ooze, and Mutant League Football, among others.
At Stone Age Gamer they have a series about Game Boy sequels to NES games, and in that Chris Randazzo writes about Blaster Master Boy, which is really a Game Boy port of Robowarrior, which was originally known as Bomber King in Japan, where it was a spinoff of Bomberman! The source for that information: the dusty back corners of my beleaguered brain.
Callum Bains at TechRadar brings us news that a number of Bethesda and id Software games are playable for free, for a limited time, to people in the Xbox Insiders program.
Jody Macgregor at PC Gamer tells us that that fan remake of Ocarina of Time will get new features, including unlocked frame rate and adjustable difficulty.
Friday night at SGDQ 2022 the TAS Block show demonstrated something special. After a recording of a Portal 2 run that predictably demolished that game, they moved on to a rather more esoteric show.
In past shows, TAS Bot has some off some pretty ridiculous sights, using something called Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). Essentially, using certain well-understood exploits, the runner (usually, but not always, a set of scripted inputs) writes a sequence of instructions into the machine’s RAM, and then transfers the code execution to that sequence, allowing for “arbitrary behavior,” meaning, almost anything that can be written into that RAM. TAS Bot at AGDQ 2014 wrote Pong into memory during a run of Super Mario World and ran it (6 minutes):
This technique has also been used to run a variant of Flappy Bird, and even a bona fide hex editor into the save RAM of Super Mario World, without even needing scripts, entirely by a human player. But this is beside the point.
In 2017, TASbot demolished the NES Classic, NES games and pulled off other very weird shenanigans (59 minutes).
There’s several of these videos, which I leave it to you to search out. They’re pretty easy to find on YouTube with the search terms “games done quick” and “tasbot”.
The point of this post is to bring you news of how players finally “obtained” the Triforce in Ocarina of Time after 23 years. The video of the show has yet to be uploaded to YouTube (it has been since I wrote this! scroll to the end), but until it shows up, Retro Game Mechanics EX has a video explaining how it was done (34 minutes):
SwankyBox has his own explainer video that’s 22 minutes. Of course, it’s all an elaborate show, but it runs on the Ocarina of Time beta cartridge found back in January of last year.
EDIT: Here it is, the whole 1-hour 13-minute epic!
Welcome to another Sunday of life in the hellscape of 2022! But you made it this far, and so here is a funny video reward.
TerminalMontage’s Something About series is, if I’m being honest, a mixed bag. Sometimes it’s way too over-the-top for my 49-year-old sensibilities. But when it works, it works, and this is one of the better ones. The lolrandomness and sudden cuts fit in very well with depicting a The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild speedrun of which, if you’re not familiar with them, more is accurate than you might think at first.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Not a lot of news today, drebnar! Let’s see what there is to see with our respective light-based optical sensors.
We usually have tons of things to link, so we’ve started leaning away from listicles, but it’s a short broadcast today, so here’s Chris Freiberg’s list of the best 15 Genesis RPGs on Den of Geek. It’s a provocative list, in order from last to first: Gauntlet IV, Ys III: Wanderers From Ys, Syndicate, Sword of Vermillion, Light Crusader, Crusader of Centy, Landstalker, Pirates! Gold, Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun, Shining Force II, Phantasy Star III, Wonder Boy in Monster World, Beyond Oasis, Shadowrun, and, of course, Phantasy Star IV. Now, Gauntlet IV is an amazing port, and no one can fault Wonder Boy in Monster World, Landstalker or Pirates! Gold on general terms, but they’re hardly traditional RPGs. And then there are the games left out: the original Shining Force didn’t make it even through SF2 did, there’s no Phantasy Star II or Shining in the Darkness, and most egregious of all IMO, nowhere to be seen are New World Computing’s terrific ports of King’s Bounty or Might & Magic II, which are fully the equal of their computer versions drebnar! And if you’re going to include Pirates! Gold, you gotta include Starflight! And while it’s a bit clunky in interface, there’s the oft-overlooked early Naughty Dog production Rings of Power!
Victoria Kennedy at Eurogamer casually drops that a documentary is approaching on the making of Nintendo 64 system seller Goldeneye 007.
Lots of places are raving about the excellence of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, proclaiming it a return to the greatness of the classic Konami arcade games. WCCFtech’s Ule Lopez chimes in, in their review, and uses it to explain about the wonders of rollback netcode. Okay by us!
Thom Dunn at Boing Boing reports that the newsletter 50 Years of Text Games is being published in book form!
Finally, back at Nintendo Life again, Alana Hagues points us to a YouTube video explain a trick allowing you to explore underwater areas in Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Rich Stanton at PC Gamer: Atari shocks the world with decent-looking game, Atari Mania! He compares it to the Japan-only Segagaga, but what the gameplay description really brings to my protoplasmic mind is NES Remix. We’re pretty harsh on the company that calls itself Atari on this site, but it’s really nice to see something genuinely interesting coming from them, that respects and pays homage to their paid-for name instead of just cashing in on it!
Ana Diaz, in the virtual pages of Polygon, says that Netflix subscribers should download Poinpy, a short and fun game that’s free to subscribers. It’s a game about climbing and making smoothies for hungry monsters!
Liam Dawe of GamingOnLinux writes about Proton 7.0-3 further improving Windows games on Steam Deck and Linux running Steam. I anxiously watch for the day when Windows 10 reaches end-of-life, since none of my current machines officially supports Windows 11, drebnar.
Noelle Warner at Destructoid relates that crowdfunded indie game A Frog’s Tale looks great, with play inspired by games like Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga.
We usually steer away from speculative news here, but the piece by Jess Reyes at Inverse is too interesting to ignore, that Breath of the Wild 2 leaks suggest Zelda might be playable and a New Game Plus mode. Now that’s some meaningless hype that we can appreciate, drebnar!
Martin Robinson at Eurogamer suggests that Street Fighter 6‘s Smash Bros-like control system might be its best new feature. I’ve mentioned here in the past a personal grudge I have against fighting games, having never grown to cotton to them back when I was a teenage blobby, but it’s nice to see the series working to make itself more accessible to new players, even if the article’s tone verges slightly on the over-enthusiastic, in my amoebic opinion.
Adam Conway at XDA, on how Quake was ported to the GBA. A quick summary: “with much difficulty.” But truly, it’s a very interesting article, with the added detail that the unreleased rom has been preserved! There’s an attached YouTube video.
Alana Hagues with the one NintendoLife link we’re allowing ourselves this time, a reminder that it’s been five years since last word of progress on Pikmin 4.
And, honestly, a lot of the pieces that make the page here are light and fluffy, but here’s one a bit more important than usual. I love the headline applied to Ethan Gach’s bit for Kotaku, entitled Activision Blizzard Clears Itself of Any Wrongdoing. And the tagline reads, “The Call of Duty publisher says it’s the victim of an ‘unrelenting barrage of media criticism'” I WONDER WHY THAT IS, ACTIVISION BLIZZARD. HOW COULD THAT HAPPEN?
This is a collection, made by Melora, of various Japanese publications related to The Legend of Zelda and its sequels, including manuals, hint books, strategy guide and manga. There’s a lot to go through! Some of it is translated, a lot isn’t. But it’s all nice to leaf through. There’s four heads to this particular Gleeok: a home page, a blog, a Twitter feed, a Flickr image archive with tons of images, and a substantial amalgamation on the Internet Archive. If you’re as familiar with Zelda games as I am, you might not even particularly need the strategy guides translated!
I still remember the first substantial thing I read about Zelda, long ago, a review in, of all places, Games Magazine. I must have been about 13 at the time. It seemed like an awesome thing to my games-addled brain, but at that moment I didn’t even have an NES. When I first played it, it was amazing. I spent months uncovering every item and secret (finding Level 7 in the second quest was a major roadblock).
So, when I think of The Legend of Zelda, I think of challenging game play, exploring a huge world, finding deviously hidden secrets, and overcoming a formidable challenge purely by my own efforts. All of these side various comics are a bit lost of me, as it is not often that I get into the lore of the series (The Wind Waker was a major exception), but I understand that a lot of other people do, and I think that’s terrific.
I have not had that the kind of experience I got from The Legend of Zelda from many other things since the era of the NES, but two places I did get it from were Breath of the Wild, of course, and Fez. I hear Tunic‘s pretty good, I probably should look into that soon….
Some more images, from various materials related to the first game. All are from this Flickr album, and were uploaded (and many of them, scanned) by Melora of History of Hyrule:
It’s Sunday! Time to slide another bead on the survival abacus over from the left side to the right. You don’t have a survival abacus? How do you know how many weeks you’ve lived?
As a reward for making it this far in life, I present a fourteen-year-old comedy video from internet funnyperson Lore Sjöberg, one of the two founders of earlyweb gigglesite Brunching Shuttlecocks and sole maintainer of currentday chuckleplace Bad Gods, in which he rates elfyhero actionguy Link’s various weapons in videogame adventurething The Legend of Zelda. Being 14 years old, the specific game in question is The Wind Waker, that one with the cartoon art style that most of us love now but hated back then, because most of us are bad.
This was during a short period after Brunching closed up, back in that ancient year 2008, during which he wrote and made occasional videos for WIRED Magazine, which is as surprised as anyone that it still exists.
Having to do with an old The Legend of Zelda game this fits easily within the site’s sphere of subject matter, but the secret reason I post this is I’ve been a great fan of Lore since Brunching Shuttlecocks, and more people need to see the things he’s done. Certainly a whole lot of my own allegedly-humorous writing style can be directly traced back to him.
“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter
Greetings, humans! Here is the gaming news I could glean from decrypting your internet broadcasts from my flying saucer floating above your atmosphere!
Jordan Devore, Destructoid: Rogue Legacy 2 Drops Vertigo From Its Traits List. You see, each character you play in that game is part of a lineage of characters, and they have semi-random traits. One of those traits flipped the screen upside-down during play. Or it did. Now it’s not in the game anymore!
Oisin Kunhke, Gamebyte tells us about a word-in-progress Breath of the Wild Randomizer mod!
Brad Linder of Liliputing notes of a new version of a three-key keyboard made by Stack Overflow.
Wololo (?) of Wololo (??) tells us that homebrew fans are reviving Playstation Home!
Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica lets us know that Nvidia is facing scrutiny from the FCC for inaccurately representing how cryptocurrency mining boosted the sales of their graphics hardware.
Sam Medley of NotebookCheck tells of AltStore, a sneaky way around Apple’s App Store for distributing software they’d rather you not use. I hesitate to speculate on how long this loophole will last, but I’m no fan of hardware lockouts and use limitations, so it’s nice while it lasts!
More news from the orchard. MacRumors talks with Feral about porting games to Apple’s new M1 hardware and the difficulties it has faced with their graphics.
Always awesome Kyle Orland at Ars Technica has an article with a headline too fun to paraphrase: Eve Online fans literally cheer Microsoft Excel features at annual Fanfest.
Ian Evenden at Tom’s Hardware talks about HoloISO, a port of SteamOS 3 that fans have gotten to run on devices other than the Steam Deck. Valve hasn’t released it officially for other hardware yet!
Jay Fingas at Engadget tells us about an auction for a gold-played Wii originally intended for the Queen of England. Seems she was denied the shiny unit due to rules against gifts.
Trent Cannon of Nintendo Life reviews Prinny Presents: NIS Classics Volume 2 for Switch.
Alex Donaldson at VG247 warns us that Sonic Origins probably won’t have Sonic 3‘s original soundtrack, due to rights issues related to Michael Jackson’s involvement with the project. Sega has been hampered with music rights across several games, including the soundtrack for some ports of Crazy Taxi.
More from Ars Technica, Sam Machkovech tells us about Rifftrax: The Game!
Zoey Handley at Destructoid on Famicom Wars, the game of which the upcoming Advance Wars Reboot Camp is a distant sequel!
Rebecca Stone at Twinfinite tells us about the 10 highest-priced used Gamecube games going! Sadly none of those I still own are up there, drebnar, not even Kirby Air Ride!
Mike Wilson writing at Bloody Disgusting celebrates the 30th anniversary of Wolfenstein 3D!
Back around to Engadget, J. Trew tells us about the lengths to which players are pushing NES Tetris.
And Zoe Sottile at CNN (swanky!) notes that Ms. Pac-Man and The Legend of Zelda are being inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.
Tunic is one of those games that I feel is not going to be talked about enough given its quality and unique selling points. On the surface, it looks like yet another isometric action-adventure game, of course in the same style as Zelda. But digging deeper, we have a game that tries to break years of gamer behavior with its most powerful mechanic simply being its manual.
Our story finds a fox waking up on the shore of a mysterious land. Unarmed and with enemies around, it’s up to you to explore and figure out what is happening here. I love the aesthetics and art style of Tunic, and the game has some amazing establishing shots and backgrounds.
As per other action-adventure games, progress is about finding McGuffins that are the key to quests and new items that will allow you to either access more of the world or uncover things in areas you’ve already visited. Some people have compared this to Dark Souls in terms of combat, mainly by the fact that you have to manage stamina when swinging, blocking, or dodging.
Where Tunic goes with all this is what’s going to either keep you playing or cause you to quit in frustration.
We’ve all grown accustomed to not reading manuals and developers not making them to begin with in the last decade. In Tunic, the manual is your tutorial, secret guide, and your progression. Throughout the world of Tunic, you will find pages of the manual that reveal everything from maps, to where you need to go, to even mechanics that you wouldn’t know otherwise.
Here’s the kicker, most of the text in the manual is written in the game’s runic language. To learn more about the world, your objectives, or even what things do, you’re going to have to figure out things from the pictures or attempt to translate the language yourself. The manual from a design standpoint is well done and reminds me heavily of the monster manual/spell book that came with Ni No Kuni (and why I got the special edition of that game).
I joked about this onstream, but Tunic is really the Zachtronics’ version of a Zelda game — it is complex, has lots of elements under the surface, and you must read the manual to make any sense out of things. The game features multiple secrets, different endings, a wealth of content for players who want to dig into it. The developers have taken a big gamble on the use of the manual, and I’m not sure if it pays off as well it should.
Tunic reminds me of the game Abyss Odyssey whose main marketing point was that the game was supposed to be played with the community to make progress. However, banking your mechanics on the size of your community, especially for a singleplayer-focused game, is a tall order. I can tell you right away that there is no way I’m going to be translating the game’s language on my own anytime soon.
If you’re trying to play this game blind without help, I cannot imagine you’re going to figure out everything on your own. Someone on my stream commented that one of the clues in the manual is literally a “Lost” reference, that as someone who never watched the show, completely went over my head.
The question remains: Is Tunic perfectly playable without needing the community or outside help? And I feel that the answer is no. I can imagine a lot of people getting frustrated and confused due to the lack of in-game direction and end up quitting before they dive into the manual itself. I also think it would have been better to integrate the manual into the game experience more, such as being able to write notes on it or being able to have it on screen as a map or reference. It is possible with brute force and just trying everything to make some headway in the game, but that may not be everyone’s cup of tea. And I can safely say that brute force will not work if you’re trying to go for the game’s true ending.
The beauty and nightmare of the game is that literally everything that you’ll need to play Tunic is in the manual, but you’re the one who has to make sense out of it all.
The more I played Tunic the more the esoteric nature of the game began to annoy me. After playing this and Elden Ring, Elden Ring is like a children’s show in terms of understanding it. The problem that Tunic has is that it presents another world, another set of rules, and another language, without really giving the player the barest understanding of it at all. The game wants you to rely on action-adventure conventions and logic until it doesn’t; that the rules of the world are like X until they’re not.
Looking up some of the many solutions to the advanced puzzles, and I can honestly say that I would never be able to figure them out without a spoiler guide.
Instead of feeling that the game was being clever, it just felt confusing for the sake of it. This is the kind of game for someone who grew up playing adventure games in the 90s or loves the deep dives into the ARGs of a Daniel Mullins game. Tunic commits the puzzle design sin of requiring way too much outside knowledge to solve its puzzles, or even know what a puzzle in the game is.
The camera can also cause problems with many things purposely hidden behind walls or at angles that you can’t see. During one fight, the camera kept spinning while locked on to the boss to the point that it started to make me dizzy. Boss fights became more frustrating as the game went on due to the camera issues and how fast they could move compared to my character.
Ultimately, I respect Tunic for what it does, and there is a lot of passion put into it. However, enjoying this game requires you to be both an action game fan, and a puzzle expert, and I think the game leans too far in some respect to the latter while still requiring a lot of the former. I would suggest if you are interested in playing Tunic for the puzzle-solving to turn on the assist modes to make that easier.
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Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
