Super Nintendo Exploration Squad 4: Tetris 2 casting call

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Episode 3 is not out yet! Don’t blame me, blame my CEO for showing up sort of randomly and eating all my time early this week. It will be out Saturday!!

I want to also mention here that I’ve asked CourierRice to be the official co-host, since they’re practically doing that anyway! I don’t actually know what that entails quite yet, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out!

The doodle below is for next weekend, July 22nd and 23rd. Check the time zone stated - I’m not sure if it automagically switches to your time zone or not! I’m in PST so it might default to that - just double check.

https://beta.doodle.com/poll/gv9qugbycuy2qwni

This time it’s Tetris 2, which my wife played when she was a child and got super good at. She also kicked my ass at it about 8 years ago, so…I hate it already

This will also have the second edition of Mahjong Minute! As you may know, the SNES has a glut of JP only Mahjong games that, frankly, nobody cares about. Instead of dedicating entire episodes to those games, we’re going to play a mahjong game for 5 minutes and then talk about it for 5 minutes in the podcast. This week it’s “Mahjong Sengoku Monogatari,” which I know nothing about. So give it a very brief whirl and we’ll discuss our very brief impressions sometime during the episode

Here’s a package containing an emulator and the ROMs, in case you need it. By default it’s set up to use the keyboard, in whatever weird configuration SNES9x defaults to.

Feel free to use your own setup though! I’m using RetroArch this time because the CRT filters are ace, but it gives a lot of people a hard time so like, whatever makes you happy.

EDITED OUT THANKS TULPA

As a reminder, we discuss the game based on 5 topics, listed below:

Gun - mechanics of play, essentially
Vanity - look, sound, feel, etc.
Mystery - does this game feel like it has any deeper mysteries? interpret as you will
Poetry - anything particularly striking, visually or word-ually or whatever
Harmony - how does it all come together?

If you’re recording, please play the main game for an hour or so, and take a couple of notes on those 5 topics. I usually just write like, a few things down that I want to remember, but do as you please. Courier wrote 1000 words on Bomberman 2 so I guess that’s the other extreme

And for Mahjong, seriously, don’t spend more than 5 minutes on it unless you’re really digging it.

Recording is still happening on Discord. I’ve created a channel just for this purpose, it’s also a neat hangout and I added a bunch of emoji for all the games we’ve played already.

I’m limiting this to 3 additional people this time, so it will be 5 people total! The chaos of the 7-8 person podcasts are fun, but really hard to edit. So I think 5 people will be good. I’ll be trying to rotate people in who haven’t had a chance to record, so even if it looks full up please sign up!

Okay, that’s it, talk to you soon!

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lots of fun last time so let’s do it again

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Saturdays are usually really busy for me because I’m scrambling to get a WonderSwan video out on time but I can join in if it’s on a Sunday.

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Oh damn I cant make it this time

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I’m back in the saddle and ready to rotate some shapes!

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I think that weekend is good for me. I’ll know a few days ahead if it isn’t. My life is pretty chaotic now, but I really wanna do this and this title in particular seems like fun. I was always curious about Tetris 2 but never tried it!

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I’m gonna try to do some mahjong learning for this episode. Can’t guarantee I’ll survive menus, though. Last episode I completely missed two thirds of the game modes due to not knowing extremely dense kanji.

Found this via a chain of events relating to Sakurina’s Swan Song YT series, which is a crazy extensive 3 and a half hour tutorial on mahjong. Figure I’ll be able to watch this casually for reference:

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I read a quick guide to this, it actually seems kind of simple, a gin rummy alike. The SNES games should automate a lot of things, like deciding seating with dice and scoring etc. I’m glad we’re taking steps to learn about it!

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Yeah, mahjong is a trick-taking game like hearts and other card games, only with fun fidget toys.

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In modern board game terms it is a tableau building game with player interaction all about bluffing and getting beneficial discards.

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Pin, Sou, Wan? We called em Dot, Bam, and Crack

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I’ve closed the doodle and picked the time - 10 AM to 12 PM Pacific on Sunday. I…didn’t want to tell anybody “no” so it’s gonna be a 6 person podcast! Even though I said 5 max! I’m such a hard-ass

Anyway! I’m going to try and find a better solution for netplay since we are once again playing a multiplayer-centric SNES game. I think I found an alternative but we’ll see.

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You guys, I do not like this game one bit.

But it did lead me to find this, so I’ll cut it some slack:

tetris.PNG605×875 20.3 KB

Edit: oh man, this FAQ has some serious gold in it… I’m going to be bringing some really choice excerpts to read on the podcast.

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can always count on OSB to find the same sources as me (clearly I’m not looking hard enough)

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I just went down an archive.org rabbithole with this guy. There’s… some stuff to share.

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I’m going to have to bow out this weekend after all. Sorry!

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Sorry to hear, hope you can make it another time!

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Bummer! We’ll getcha next time

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Thanks! I’m finishing/defending a thesis and moving to Baltimore within the next month, so I’ll stop volunteering myself until my life is stable again. Really eager to get in on these though!

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yoooooooooooo

YOOOOOOOOOO

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