I can't believe today was a good play (Games you played today)

King of Posters King of Posters 2000
3515

I dont have a lot of time for games lately but when I do its been all Warios Woods

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Love Birdo’s bored DMV employee energy.
Its a game that allows me to either try to set up combos or defocus and just whip monsters around with the simple move set. I really enjoy how it rewards staying chill, which is what I need right now.
Interestingly like in Toad Treasure Tracker, Toad cannot jump.

I suppose I should add for those who don’t know: Toad runs around inside the puzzle environment trying to make matches of like colored monsters and bombs, bombs are needed to make the match disappear.

They do this by:
Running up the sides of stacks
Lifting stacks
Pulling single elements out
Pushing what they are carrying below them
Dropping what they have in front of them
Kicking single elements over 1 space
Toad can act as a block, supporting elements so they line up for a match.

9 Likes
3516

Woah! It’s nice to see someone else dig this weird game. I’ve loved Wario’s Woods for years.

It’s worth looking into it’s spiritual sibling Wrecking Crew 98, which is also a puzzle game with weird platformer elements for SNES. Not as platformery as woods, but definitely on a similar wavelength.

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3517

Cool! Ill have to check that one out.

I played this game a lot as a kid and it resonates with me more than rotating blocks or pouyos. One of my favorite things is that the challenges vary and difficulty isn’t linear.

3518

Happy to see Pathologic 2 land on all the platforms at last, and that people are dabbling with it. Made me think of doing a second playthrough, but then I thought maybe I should play Pathologic 1 as Bachelor? I am flirting with the idea and I clearly have some emotional reluctance to jump back in.

Patho 2 was so good because of this. It was a game that scared me like when I was young and doubted if I could really have the patience or gumshen to make it through a big-ass book or a supposedly really tough game. I don’t feel that way about much these days, so I cherish it whenever something can bring that feeling back and make me kind of tremble at just the thought! So I’m jumping into the Patho 1 Bachelor mulchmaker, heedless.

edit: also, completely unrelated, but I want a port of Panzer Dragoon Orta on PC, ty.

6 Likes
3519

this game rules. the later levels are, IMO, mostly just “work” instead of “skill” but this game feels like a good kind of work.

1 Like
3520

Always been puzzled they haven’t done more with Wrecking Crew as a concept. Even the NES game I haven’t seen discussed that much. I spent forever “recording” original levels on a blackboard, and I found a guaranteed design for the golden hammer to appear. I don’t think I’ve ever seen discussion of the golden hammer online. (I certainly hadn’t as of, like, 15 years ago. I looked!)

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3521

Reminds me that one day I need to figure out how to play Wrecking Crew, since it’s one of the few NES games I’ve picked up multiple times and literally haven’t known what I’m supposed to be doing.

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3522

The basic thing is, you need to destroy all the wall tiles. Different tiles take different numbers of hits or have different kinds of functionality (e.g., the silver ladder pieces that can also be destroyed). Bombs will commit one hit to any tile to the left and right, in a domino effect.

You can walk off the left and right of the screen. There are enemies, each with their own attack patterns and different vulnerabilities. Sometimes they can go “behind” the level, through doors. Sometimes you face off against Spike, who is basically a proto-Wario. If you hang around too long, fireballs will start to fire from the sides of the screen.

It’s a lot like Lode Runner, except with smashing shit instead of collecting gold, and with elements of Mario Bros. and, sorta, Ice Climber.

(And heck, I guess there’s an obvious Breakout legacy too.)

What no one tells you, and isn’t written down in the manual or anything, is that sometimes under remarkable conditions when a bomb goes off, an item will appear. Most of these just give you points, but the rarest one, the golden hammer, lets you smash anything in one hit. It may have other powers, like letting you thwack any enemy, but it’s been forever since I’ve messed with it.

Part of the major appeal to Wrecking Crew was that, like Lode Runner, you could design real tile-based levels. You still couldn’t save them, but this was a world away from the track design of Excitebike or Mach Rider. It wasn’t just setting up obstacles; you were making a whole world, within certain logical parameters. I wish I’d taken a picture of some of the designs I came up with as a kid, as I basically bent the game logic backwards until it snapped, figured out how to do tons of shit I’ve never seen recorded anywhere.

10 Likes
3523

Oh shit; in the last decade I guess the golden hammer has become more of an open secret.

Here is the method used to get the Golden Hammer in Wrecking Crew. It’s an equation based on your Phase number plus the number of times you swing your hammer in that phase. Then divide it by 8. If your REMAINDER is 1, you get the Golden Hammer. Just be sure to bust 3 bombs, no more, no less, with the final bomb on the final swing being the “prizebomb” (the bomb that gives you your prize, whether it be the Golden Hammer, a pig, a cat, or Santa Claus). The rest of your swings can be at a wall or at thin air, just as long as the total is right. So if your equation equals one more than a multiple of 8, the Golden Hammer is yours!

And here’s the theme. Which is so frickin’ Hip Tanaka.

I can’t tell you how nuts it was to see this kind of undocumented stuff appear in a game, back then. And everyone just assumed you were making things up. There was such a sense of mystery to game design, like anything could be in there…

10 Likes
3524

Yeah, I guess this has become a thing now. Back in the early 2000s I went on a whole tear on a couple of occasions, asking everywhere I could about the golden hammer, and no one had a clue what I was talking about. And I had trouble replicating the conditions I’d figured out when I was younger.

(This may or may not explain the inclusion of a certain hidden item in Builder.)

3 Likes
3525

I really miss this sense. I don’t know if it’s possible to ever attain it again.

Also, complex calculations of numbers for rare and powerful items is so much cooler than random drops.

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3526

I had regular dreams about the original Zelda. In one I often recall, burning a bush in the right place under the right conditions led to a dark world. (This was years before LttP, of course.) With all the stuff like minus worlds and small firey Mario and Metroid wall-door tricks and what-have-you—combined with the structure of Zelda where any rock, any bush could hide a secret, and there was a second quest where all the rules were different including new and important undocumented ones—anything seemed possible. Videogames used to fire up my imagination as much as reading a book.

Until the other day I thought the first fanfic I ever wrote was for Steven Universe. That’s not quite true, as I recalled the third grade assignment that I based on my narrative experience with Ice Climber.

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3527

I wrote a whole series of illustrated Mario fics when I was in first or second grade. I bound them in construction paper and tried to sell them to my younger sisters for a nickel.

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3528

Speaking of mystery in game design, I recently played through NiGHTS into Dreams and only barely interacted with the A-Life system. Then I read this old interview that made it sound way more complex than I thought; the Nightopians have stats? They perform specific actions depending on your behavior? I heard about how they could affect the music if you accidentally killed them or helped hatch an egg, but nothing this deep. Then I watched this video: https://youtu.be/uRe3yHir6HA

I’m simply amazed that something like this exists in the game. I can only imagine how this would have wormed its way into my brain if I had been exposed to it as a kid, if it had been one of the five games I had access to in a given year.

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3529

Oh no I think games should be banned.

1 Like
3530

You’re saying you don’t want to engage in cross-species breeding?

3531

i just feel a deeply resonant dark energy emitting from these specific nearly indecipherable but rhythmically lulling combinations of nearly-proper nouns and half-real actions, their prodding pseudo-logic mystery and its cataloging

4 Likes
3532

someone has opened a stinky chest and its smelly vapors are seeping out into common reality

3533

I’m just proud that the user busted out Babelfish to access this secret knowledge. An international team of researchers made sure we could understand what cute sprites in a Sega Saturn game were up to.

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3534

20 years ago I was involved with someone who had extensively documented the Nightopian and Chao breeding mechanics. She was, like, the go-to person on the Web or Usenet for Sega A-life genetics.

2 Likes