Vidya Game Pride

King of Posters
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When I was 10, I loved scythers.

Not in a Rule 34 way, though as soon as I saw that 'mon–man–I was in love. I always had a scyther on my team (because it was the coolest), and eventually–when Gold and Silver–rolled around, I became post-game obsessed with raising the perfect scyther.

I didn’t know much about the actual stat mechanics of poke-battling and leveling. Did anybody at that age, especially in those broken generations? But, from raising five scythers simultaneously, I started to realize that there was variation in the way scyther stats developed. The strongest scyther initially would not be the strongest scyther five levels later. The younger I started raising them, the stronger they would become.

Eventually, this fascination with the underpinnings of this foreign world resulted in my carrying a ream of graph paper, on which I essentially kept spreadsheets of my scythers’ growth.

My parents are not numbers people, and I had never seen a spreadsheet before. I basically just realized on my own that the most efficient way to raise my Master Scyther was to meticulously catalog for trends.

I eventually lost interest in all this around the 200 hour mark, and I never quite figured out what was going on, eventually settling for the strongest scyther I could muster.

It was only when the third generation came out and I heard about EV and IV training that I realized that I had been onto something. Had I been a bit more meticulous, a bit more obsessive, maybe more of a boy genius, I might have independently discovered the Stat Experience system.

I look back at that and think, “Man. I was the coolest ten year old.”

tl;dr:

What’s a gaming accomplishment, obsession, or knowledge that you’re actually proud of? What’s something that you look at and think, “Okay, I know it’s supposed to be lame, but honestly I think it’s cool as hell”?

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Possibly my adoration of famicom games. I made a facebook post recently-ish about how cute I think Contra is, and colorful Famicom carts are my moe weakness. I feel a overwhelming sense of guardianship when looking at them, and want to carry around armfuls of them. Kid Kool is a really weird little game that tried hard to be something interesting, and there a bunch of other endearingly ambitious experiments on the system like it that would never get sequels. Otocky, Sweet Home, Low G Man, Atlantis no Nazo, etc. They were doing the best with what they had!

I’m basically the Nintendo Badge Arcade rabbit.

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The only writing I’ve ever been proud of has been the PS Home Travel Journal.

I’m still convinced I discovered that you can get coins out of posts in Mario 64 years before the community at large.

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as far as anyone can tell i am the world-record holder in probability 0. i don’t really know if that means something, but being the best in the world at anything does have some psychological weight to it.

hey, same here. in high school i put a few hundred hours into a project that involved curating all the music and zelda-perspective tiles in famicom games. this never really went anywhere in particular (though i still have all the files for it), but it did open me up to things i never would have appreciated otherwise, like the nuances of color palettes and tile memory, or the history behind Gimmick!, or like a hundred other cool obscure games which have probably gotten even less attention (Holy Diver, Metal Slader Glory, Tetrastar, Layla, Legacy of the Wizard, Sweet Home, Shatterhand, SCAT/Final Mission, Moon Crystal, Little Samson, Guerilla War, Crystalis, Just Breed, etc)

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that means something to me. let’s fite

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i am reasonably confident that if the game were more popular my record would be beaten pretty quickly, although i stopped after four years because i felt like i had hit the skill ceiling so it’s hard to say

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those are definitely things I would be interested in reading about! I’m reminded that I once saw a visual explanation of JetGunner on its home website(?) of how all the little details in the game are recreations of nes hardware gimmicks, including color palettes and such. I can’t find it on google now, but it was really cool. Maybe one of the best done Retro Classic indie titles in that sense.

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sure, which parts specifically?

i ended up posting a near-complete list of the nes music i curated at the beginning of this thread on old sb

the work i did collecting nes tiles is kind of all over the place and includes tangential projects, like attempts to rip tilesets from Seiken Densetsu 3 (the rips from this game floating around online are woefully incomplete) and convert them to match nes color palette restrictions with minimal loss of detail. i did it for practice and also to see if the quality of the game’s art would still show through with more onerous color palette restrictions. my personal favorite thing to come out of that was this animated ocean tile:

which looks better than any water tile that actually existed on the system, i think (in hardware, you would flip these tiles vertically/horizontally to get all the necessary permutations for a complete body of water)

oh i almost forgot! i am kind of proud of the fact that i saved these tiles from an abandoned castlevania romhack from falling off the face of the earth. it includes some of the best pixel art i’ve seen within the console’s restrictions, it’s a shame the artist working on it went completely AWOL

as far as technical stuff on the nes goes, i can post some articles. one of the first cool things i realized while messing with tiles in photoshop, something that isn’t immediately apparent from e.g. looking at rips posted online, is that while color palettes are assigned to tiles in 16x16 pixel blocks, the tiles themselves are actually 8x8 pixels (specifically, each tile is an 8x8 array of 2-bit numbers indicating which color to output at a pixel from whatever 4-color palette is assigned to it). what this means in practice is that the nes can make it look like there are many more tiles in memory than there actually are by shuffling around the 8x8 tiles in the 16x16 color blocks, e.g. making ground tiles look less monotonous, or cheating to make big images like the ones you’d see in the cutscenes of Moon Crystal possible to hold in memory. creative usage of this hardware trick was one of those things that (outside of in-cart expansion chips) contributed to making late nes titles look so much more polished than earlier ones

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When Chris Hardwick is challenged on his nerd credentials (because nobody who is now thin and not-ugly could have ever been a nerd when they were a child), he’ll often reference that he used to bring an Atari cartridge to school, essentially as a safety blanket.

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Anything on Gimmick! that I wouldn’t know from Frank Cifaldi?

As far as I know, we still have no idea who made it.

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i’m not sure what you mean, exactly…like, beyond the names listed in the credits? four names, plus three “special thanks” isn’t a lot, and there’s obviously a possibility of uncredited contributions, but a team that small isn’t implausible either for that time (to throw out a few arbitrary points of comparison, megaman 1 was made by six people, while super metroid, with an obviously higher profile, was made by a team of fifteen at R&D1 a year before gimmick).

as far as i know everyone who worked on Gimmick has left videogames (with the exception of the composer, masashi kageyama, who has apparently started to dabble in videogame music again outside of his career in photography, design and playing in jazz houses), but they’re not reclusive or anything. we know pretty much nothing about the credited artist, hiroyuki kagoya, but we have this translated interview with tomomi sakai on the development of gimmick, and i’ve seen him respond to english comments on his blog.

i stumbled on a couple of those posts a little over a year ago and something about them has stuck with me.

also, according to those comments (there are new ones from last month! whoa!), tomomi sakai really likes this (probably sb-famous) performance of daddy mulk. i find this bit of trivia pretty entertaining.

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i think it would be dangerous for you to get a pc engine

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also there are several games that no-one but me has written about in english, which is nice

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i was ziggurat world champion for a while, that was fun

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Oh, I think this is a combination of me misremembering things and not realizing that I haven’t checked in on this in, like, 6 years.

I was thinking of Tomomi Sakai as one of those guys who used a pseudonym, but actually I think the deal was just that Cifaldi wanted to interview him but couldn’t get a hold of him or couldn’t get him to agree to an interview. I think this was literally 6 years ago (he talked about it on the Retronauts podcast and made an annotated YouTube video), and I probably haven’t checked for an update on this in, like, 4 years.

So yeah: interviews from a year ago are news to me! Thanks!

It looks like you accidentally doubled your hyperlinks, but I take it you meant to link this interview: http://www.glitterberri.com/developer-interviews/making-mr-gimmick/

This is a pretty cool interview. It’s interesting to hear that Famitsu doomed it with a low score, due to difficulty. That sucks. And I love the programmer logic of, “People will be really excited that I made a SNES-level game on the NES!” Though the confrontation with reality seems a little sad.

Man, the ironic thing is that if Gimmick! had been easy, it could have been a late-gen kiddie game like Kirby and might have had a more general appeal. Maybe the original game could have been the Hard Mode. I wonder if Frank has seen this? I know he really wants to ask him about the screens where you just hang out.

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Man, Gimmick!, Cocoron, and Ufouria are so damn good.

Clash at Demon Head has never clicked with me.

One of the awesome things for me about Gimmick! is that it was created during the early 90’s, so it has that pastel aesthetic that only lasted for about 4 years from around '89-93. Somehow, early Ranma episodes instilled in me a strong nostalgia for that aesthetic, but the stuff that matches it is pretty rare. So it’s really cool that one of the best games ever made is an example.

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good news, it’s all over tumblr

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What am I missinf in ufouria? That it is moderately charming? It feels like a game for 7 year olds.

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When I first played through Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, there was a level on a star destroyer where you were expected to saw your way through hundreds of helpless stormtroopers with utter freewheeling carnal glee. There was absolutely nothing they could possibly do to harm you.

I’d been really in love with the little conversations you could overhear between stormtroopers in previous missions, detailing what they were gonna do when they go off their shift, what their career ambitions were in the future, etc. I start feeling pretty bad about killing as many stormtroopers as I had.

So, I did the entire mission by force pulling their blasters out of their hands, which left them defenseless and harmless, hands in the air until you passed them by, at which point they’d scurry away and run aimlessly around the level. I did this to every single trooper on the level, disarming the entire star destroyer and not taking a single life.

You then make your way to the engine room, where the mission requires that you turn off the ship’s artificial gravity. Boxes and droids and, yes, helpless unarmed stormtroopers were lifted dozens of feet into the air, wheeling around like overturned turtles as you floated your way to the bridge through some air duct.

Upon reaching the bridge, you shot the commanding officer, and were then required to turn the artificial gravity back ON to progress to the end of the level. I’ll never forget the collective screams of literally every innocent soul I tried to save as they all crashed fatally to the floor at once, all across the ship. I must’ve killed hundreds of men in that single instant, and heard every single one.

Not proud of it! Just… it sticks in my mind as this moment when my glowing altruistic pride was crushed into cinema-ready dark side tragedy mythos by route linear level progression.

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i collect source engine game maps like people collect cassette tapes. like, i log into servers with no players just to download their maps and quakesounds. someone has to preserve these things. they are art and must be treated as such

catch my MoMA exhibition on half life 2: deathmatch in 20 years

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