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.
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):
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!
“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!
Atari Mania
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!
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.
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?
Source: Art and Artifacts – Upload credit: Melora of historyofhyrule.com
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:
Publication Source: Million Publishing Guide – Contributor Source: Zelda Dungeon
Publication Source: 3 Game Guide Contributor Source: Donated by Mases of Zelda Dungeon
Originally found in the comic magazine Monthly Shonen Captain May 18, 1986, discovered thanks to twitter.com/kazzykazycom
Found by kazzykazcom on Twitter, unknown originSource: From the The Legend of Zelda: The Mirage Castle by Akio Higuchi and Yuko Tanaka, 1986
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!
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!
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.
A Confused Fox
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.
A Mystery Manual
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).
the manual in of itself deserves praise for being its own game within the 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.
Collaborative Solo Affair
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.
Getting Lost
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.
trying to find everything in the game on your own is going to be a huge task
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.
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”
