The gameplay of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is famously limited to three days. After three days the moon crashes into the town, destroying it. You have to go back in time before then (which also saves the game) and continue completing subquests in a non-linear, atemporal kind of way.
But as it turns out, there is a way around it, which puts the game into a sort of limbo. People who would ordinarily be moving around on their schedules are completely missing. Entering into some buildings crashes the game. In any event you’re stuck until you finally play the Song of Time and reset the world, getting events back on track.
But how does this happen? And how is the time system implemented internally? It turns out to be quite the interesting breakdown. Skawo (I imagine it said like the Daleks’ home world pronounced by Elmer Fudd or Homestar Runner), who is starting to seem almost like the PannenKoek of the Ocarina of Time engine games explains it in 15 minutes, here:
What I remember doing is working hard on a post proclaiming to the world the existence of a weird offshoot of the Pac-Man universe called Packri Monster. I wrote it, and I saved it (I believe) so it would be posted on the morning of January 16th.
Well, I just had a look and instead of the post I thought I had scheduled, there was just an empty shell, a title to an empty page. Even the name “Packri Monster” was misspelled. How embarrassing!
But what’s even more embarrassing is that I found out what I had written before had a notable factual inaccuracy, so I’m kind of glad it didn’t get out in that form.
Let’s remedy all of these things right now.
The Backstory & Coleco Pac-Man
Namco made the original Puck-Man, in Japan. Bally-Midway licensed it, changed the name to Pac-Man to avoid people messing with the P in the title, and that was when Pac-Man became a worldwide mega-hit. At the time game rights tended to get portioned off separately to consoles, home computers and dedicated handhelds. While (in)famously Atari locked up the console and (through Atarisoft) home computer rights to Pac-Man, the handheld rights went out to a variety of places.
Notably Coleco made (relatively speaking) a respectable tabletop version of Pac-Man, doing the best they could with its discrete graphic elements. You can play a recreation of that here. (Note: use WASD to control the game, the arrow keys are for Player 2.)
Coleco Pac-Man is interesting as a game in itself. Its box confidently asserts that it “sounds and scores” like the arcade game, of which I assure you neither is true. Its background noise is an annoying drone; while it usually takes two boards to reach 10,000 points in the arcade and earn the sole extra life, it took me five on my test play of Coleco Pac-Man. Even so, it’s the best handheld or tabletop version of Pac-Man from the time.
Because all of the LED graphic elements of Coleco Pac-Man’s are discrete, pre-made images, they had to take certain liberties with the in-game art. Pac-Man is drawn permanently facing left; alternate spaces on the board depict him with mouth open and closed. The dot image is repurposed as one of the ghosts’ eyes. Energizers are red, so when a ghost passes by one of those spaces one of its eyes, too, turns red. Ghosts don’t show up in different colors to identify their personalities. Each contains a Pac-Man graphic themselves, which isn’t illuminated when they are vulnerable. All of these elements are repeated throughout the board, visible dimly when inactive, and lit brightly when intended to be used as a game element.
I maintain that Coleco tabletop Pac-Man is playable. The simulation linked above has a flaw, you can’t hold down a direction to take a corner early like you could in the arcade, you have to press a key at the moment you sail past an intersection if you want to take it. But even in this form, it’s arguably a better game, in playability, than Atari 2600 Pac-Man. It sold 1.5 million units after all, despite coming out after.
It was a time when it wasn’t uncommon for companies to make ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) that could play one or more games, which they would license to other companies. General Instruments made a number of these for dedicated consoles (here’s a catalog of their products), playing a number of games, including Pong and Tank clones.
One such ASIC was made by Bandai, the same company that decades later would merge with Pac-Man creator Namco itself. It was made for a handheld that Bandai themselves would produce called Packri Monster.
Packri Monster as a Game
It’s an interesting little machine. Like Coleco Pac-Man, it uses discrete images for its graphics, which have to be mixed together in various ways to satisfy all of its play requirements.
Note the yellow letters on the package: PACK MAN. It’s obviously intended to be a fly-by-night knockoff, from the very company that would later merge with Pac-Man’s creator!
Differences are many. The maze is much smaller, the ghosts (“Bogeys”) are limited in number to three, and there’s only two “power foods,” in the upper corners of the maze.
The lack of one entire ghost makes sense, given the smaller size of the game. But it turns out there’s another knockoff of Pac-Man, with an even smaller maze, and a bizarre limitation. It’s the game I had originally mistaken for Packri Monster, and I wish I knew more about this variant, because it’s fairly widespread.
Mystery Handheld Pac-Man Variant #3
This version is probably best known as the basis of Tomy’s handheld Pac-Man game, in the appealing yellow case.
Tomy Puckman, using the original Japanese name and character art! Image from The Old Robots Web Site.
A simulation of Tomy Pac-Man is playable in MAME, and additionally can be found on the Internet Archive in playable form. It’s a simpler game than the Coleco version, and like Packri Monster tops out at three ghosts, starting at level four.
Especially notable about this version is its extraordinary difficulty, and dare I say, unfairness. There’s only 34 discrete places in the maze that Pac-Man can even be at, and two, later on three, of those places are going to contain ghosts at a time. From two to four locations can be threatened (“in check”) by the ghosts at any moment, for unlike arcade Pac-Man, these ghosts are more prone to reversing direction whenever they want. At the start of a board ghosts are prone to behaving randomly, so you can’t even devise patterns to ensure your safety. The Energizers become essential tools for survival, and expire rapidly, so you’re unlikely to ever eat more than two ghosts with one.
This is the only version of 80s handheld Pac-Man that I know of that has fruit. Graphic limitations mean that it’s always going to be cherries, but the points advance to 400 pts. per fruit on level four, where it becomes an essential component of your score. One extra life is awarded at 2,000 points.
But the weirdest thing about this version… since, like in all these versions, Pac-Man is stuck permanently facing left, and the dots are set between Pac-Man locations in this version, the unknown designer of Tomy Pac-Man decided that the player can only eat dots and Energizers when traveling left. The game isn’t about visiting every location in the maze, but visiting every dot when traveling in the right, that is left direction!
So if you’re fleeing from left-to-right, you’ll never eat any dots. It influences your travel significantly, and you’ll unavoidably often have to double back over dots to satisfy Pac-Man’s directional digestion.
When you pass level five, you get told: “good“. I don’t know if any later four-letter message await you. There aren’t enough elements for “wow”.
Like Packri Monster, Tomy version of Pac-Man’s got licensed out, but in an unusual format: at the basis for an LCD watch Pac-Man game from Nelsonic. Sum Square Stories shows off this version here. (8 minutes). There’s some substantial differences: it seems easier, scores much lower, and starts you out against only one ghost. But it retains Tomy Pac-Man’s most distinctive quirk, that eating can only be done when going west.
Why does this version of Pac-Man do that? To make the game harder? I have no clue at all. Can anyone enlighten me as to the reason?
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Along the same lines as videogamedunkey’s Explanation of Kingdom Hearts (previously) is this gloriously insane video that untangles all the non-linearity and heedless added backstory of the various Sonic the Hedgehog games and presents them temporally untwisted (9 minutes). Prepare to have your shameful ignorance of the ridiculously meandering basis of a video game cartoon character’s backstory shattered!
There was an All ? Panels in Mario Kart World run at AGDQ this year, and it was great, but that’s not what this is. No, this world record was recorded (geez that phrasing annoys me) in the practice room at the event. (28 minutes, don’t bother following both link BTW they go to the same place, I just didn’t want to link the parenthetical)
So what is this? As I think everyone knows by now, Mario Kart World is an open world game, and has an expansive free run mode. There’s a few things to do in free run: search out and complete P Switch Missions, collect Peach Medallions, and find and activate ? Panels.
The Panels look and act like the ? Panels in the SNES game: just roll over one to activate it. It doesn’t earn you an item like they did way back then, but the game does remember you did it, and it earns you a new decal for your vehicles.
There are 150 panels in MKW’s sprawling environment, and some of them are in some really tricky places! Please enjoy Helix13_ collecting them all in less than half an hour, showing off the game’s vehicle-parkour movement system as it runs, and demonstrating all kinds of tricks, like using the Rewind feature to get back from activating out-of-the-way panels. Or taking advantage of the fact that MKW will give you credit for a panel that you’re about to hit if you pause and change regions. And you get to enjoy MKW’s great soundtrack along the way, consisting of dozens of great songs from throughout Mario’s history.
We appreciate all kinds of electronic entertainment here at Set Side B, and fun and interesting websites definitely fits that idiosyncratic bill. It’s a simple guestbook-style application. The whole site, including the OS, is served from a single 3½-inch floppy disk.
The idea is, people can go there and enter a message for posterity, that will also be saved to the disk. Once it fills up that’s it, no more messages will be saved. Go and leave a message for the future, or at least, as much future as the lifespan of the magnetic substrate of the disk will allow.
Mario Kart World, of course, has an open world mode, and much of the interest of an open world racing game is dynamic situations produced by the traffic.
There’s been explorations into where the cars and NPCs come go, and we posted a video on that topic a while back. Sometimes they end up meandering in loops. Sometimes they leave the roads and just go tearing about the landscape. Sometimes cars actually find parking spaces, leave themselves there, and NPCs pop out and start wandering.
Well, similar questions can be asked about the game’s trains (15m). Mr A-Game on Youtube followed them around for a while to see where they come from. He claims to have discovered “how the train system of Mario Kart World works,” but I’m not sure. There appear to be tracks that trains can travel down either way, meaning, there must be some system in place to prevent train to train collisions. He does uncover some strong tendencies of trains to take particular routes though.
If I had to guess, I think trains probably aren’t modeled outside far out of sight of active players, that they’re spawned randomly, and that some checks are performed to make sure two trains won’t share the same track. This is a guess, but it would be in line with the impromptu nature of the auto traffic simulation. It’d also mean that the P-Switch missions that rely on trains being in a specific place won’t be disrupted, and that the train can be left behind in the world after the mission without getting in the way of any grand schedule coordinating the trains.
Well, that’s what I think. Maybe I’m wrong. But… maybe I’m right?
Really minor thing here, I’ve already mentioned it on social media in a couple of places, but here it’s a bit more auspicious?
I mentioned Yacht and Panic’s entertaining 90s alien cable simulation Blippo+ before. Blippo+ has 11 weeks of programming, with the last week being mostly credits and outtakes for all the various shows.
If you watch the Credits channel to the end, there’s a QR code that leads to a webpage that directs you to send a SASE to a specific address. (That’s a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope for you people younger than 35 years old.)
If you do this, they send you back something really nice in the mail. This!
In the story of Blippo+, the planet Blip discovers a “bend in space” that carries their broadcasts to a distant planet, implied to be Earth. At the end of the programming, some of the teenagers of Blip venture into the bend and off to an unknown fate. We don’t get any information on what happened to them, but maybe the existence of this patch implies they made it through after all.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
The internet is a busy place. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a set of easy-to-understand instructions on how to operate it?
Yes? Well, too bad. What you get instead is the sarcastic internet instructions of Newgrounds user MikeFallek (1½ minutes). There’s two parts, explaining things nobody has ever heard of before, the “vol-u-me con-trol” in video chat, and something called an “e-mail cli-ent.” Please enjoy, and learn! (What follows should be a Newgrounds embed. It doesn’t preview well for me. If it doesn’t work, I must refer you to the “sarcastic internet instructions” link, above.)
WARNING: This isn’t a Youtube video! It’s good old text, like Frog intended the internet to be!
Over on The Gamesoft Fun Club, David Cabrera explains how great arcade Ridge Racer is, that isn’t exactly like the Playstation version, in fact it runs on more powerful hardware. And he’s played so much of it, including on the recent Arcade Archives release, that he has one of the top 50 times in the world on it. He’s so enthusiastic about it that I think it may nearly rival my own obsession with arcade Rampart, although that’d be quite a lot of unhealthy focus indeed.
Image from the linked article.
Mind you, arcade Ridge Racer only has one course, although according to David it plays quite differently depending on your difficulty. There’s an extra section that opens up at the higher levels, and the course is designed so that higher speeds requires more skill to make it through without crashing.
It’s not really a long article so go give it a read? It’s the kind of thing that makes the web great.
Made in 1995 but not released until 2001, it’s really something. That is, it’s a thing, and there is some of it. Not only are the effects and acting somewhere beyond the line of rationality, it looks like it’s barely playable, even on the easiest difficulty. Imagine plunking down $50 for this in 2001 for your obsolete Sega CD, out of production for five years.
Huh…. on further reflection, that actually sounds awesome! The Playstation 2 had been released by that point! It’s certainly memorable, although I wouldn’t have wanted to buy it for purposes of playing it unironically.
Resurrecting Sinistar: A Cyber-Archeology Documentary is a 166-minute, that’s approaching three hours long, documentary about the effort to recover the source code of the Williams arcade classic, made by SynaMax.
SynaMax also made a modified version of the game that makes the notoriously difficult arcade game easier in various ways, in interesting ways.
I’ve been watching Awful Block on AGDQ, so that’s all I have for you today. Hopefully that’ll hold you over, although I suggest that you might want to watch AGDQ too, while it lasts.
Interactive Fiction blog Renga in Blue reports that a rare variant of classic Adventure, that was playable on Compuserve for many years and only went down when their game offerings went offline in the mid 90s, has been recovered and made playable online.
Promo image for this version of Adventure from Regna in Blue. You know it’s an adventure game in the70s & 80s when there’s a bunch of mostly naked people in the art.
It’s called Adventure 751 in reference to the number of available points there are to find. The post in turn links to Arthur O’Dwyer’s article on this version, and other versions, which seem to contain substantial added content from the original Crowther & Woods version.
It’s playable, but requires a lot of effort to get there, including compiling a PDP10 emulator and loading a disk image into it. I wish VCFMW wasn’t months behind me now, it’d have been a blast to see if someone there had access to a working PDP10, and if the game could have been transferred onto it!
As O’Dwyer mentions, there are plenty of games from this era that are just completely, utterly lost, with practically no chance of recovery. And even versions like this, that can technically be played, still hang on by just a thread. The people who created them often don’t have accessible archives, and the institutions who hosed them rare seem interest in preserving them. It’s a sorry state indeed, but at least there are a few survivals like this one.
