Shoot 'em ups are great fun, but many of them are incredibly difficult. This takes a look at the evolution of the genre, and gives some examples of shoot 'em ups that have a difficulty level that is fair for beginners.
After reading the MGS2 story summary in the book 'Metal Gear Solid: Hideo Kojima's Magnum Opus', I started thinking about the problems I have with the Metal Gear storylines in general and the MGS2 story in particular.
An overview of some of the larger collections of Syltefar game recordings, including recordings of the Resident Evil series, the FromSoftware games, the Metal Gear series, Street Fighter, and more.
There is a mostly forgotten genre of action game where you are slowly weakening an enemy base by destroying its defenses and enemy vehicles. This specific style mostly appeared in war games from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first game in the genre may have been Will Wright's Raid on Bungeling Bay from 1984, and the most famous might be Mike Posehn's Gulf War chopper game Desert Strike from 1992.
Here at syltefar.com, We have dubbed this action game subgenre Base Attack games.
The research of these games took some very unexpected twists and turns including SimCity, Jay 'The Father of the Amiga' Miner, and Jeffrey Epstein.
Adaptive music (also referred to as 'dynamic music') is game music that reacts to changes in gameplay state. It has been used in games since the 1970s, and encompasses a variety of techniques, from tempo and pitch changes, to re-sequencing of precomposed pieces, and dynamic mixing.
Generative music (also known as 'procedural' or 'algorithmic' music) is generated at run-time in software, either by generating individual notes, or by real-time synthesis. Generative methods can be used to make game music that is highly adaptive or even interactive, meaning generated directly from player input, but this is not always the case, as there are examples of non-adaptive generative music.
This article will provide an overview and history of techniques and analyze a games that employ various adaptive or generative music techniques.
Most Street Fighter games are amazing when playing with a friend, but not all of them are fun in single-player. In the more difficult games, you are forced to play in a robotic way that exploits weaknesses in the AI opponents. Since there are so many games and ports in this series, this overview might be handy for casual Street Fighter fans.
Some game releases challenge the structure of my game database. The impressive game collection Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration inspired a redesign of how game collections are represented.
In 1995, two different Justice League games came out for the SNES and the Genesis. They were developed by two different companies, both later known as 'Blizzard'.
I've been skipping annoying video game puzzles for 17 years by writing brute force scripts. Usually, writing the script is more fun than trying to solve a frustrating sliding block puzzle.
From the earliest video games in the 1960s to early 3D games in the 1990s, 4 basic types of rendering technology have been used: vector graphics, raster bar graphics, tiles and sprites, and framebuffer graphics. In modern game hardware (since the mid-1990s), framebuffer rendering with dedicated 3D hardware are ubiquitous, as this is a very flexible approach to both 2D and 3D graphics, but this approach was not always practical during the early decades of video game history, as memory was very expensive.
I have a complicated history with FromSoftware games, starting in 2004 with annoyance with a underwhelming Tenchu-sequel, continuing through not liking any of the Souls games until it finally clicked for me with Bloodborne in 2015. Since then, I went back and played all the Souls games, and enjoyed them immensely.
Death Stranding is a very special game, both in terms of tone, gameplay, and storytelling. I wholeheartedly recommended experiencing it, even with the risk that it might frustrate some players.
The history of my YouTube channel started back in 2009 with a Noby Noby Boy recording. In the 9 years since then, I have uploaded 999 more videos. The PlayStation 4 video streaming feature was key in getting me to upload game recordings. However, some videos cause trouble, as invalid copyright claims start to appear.
Text adventures mostly disappeared from the games world, but playing this type of game might provide experiences unlike any other type of game. Here are my thoughts after finishing the 1987 DOS adventure The Lurking Horror.
New audio-related tags have been added, along with articles that describe the terms in detail:
Adaptive Music including horizontal and vertical adaption, synchronized scoring (including 'Mickey Mousing').
Generative Music including interactive music, note generation and software synthesized music.
New music genre categories have also been added, very early though:
The Electronic Music category contains games featuring electronic dance music genres such as techno, house, drum 'n bass, dubstep, and synthwave as well as experimental listening-oriented genres such as ambient or IDM.
Two sound design categories have been added:
The Speech Synthesis category contains games that employ speech synthesis.
The Ambience category contains early examples of games with ambience sound.
Finally, the Music Test category contains games with a music test menu.
PCSX2 is Great - I was trying to get this to run in RetroArch with the LPRS2 core, but I had some bad texture bugs in the cemetary that I couldn't figure out how to get rid of. Now I installed the newest PCSX2, which seems like a very well-designed and user friendly emulator these days, even with RetroAchievement support. The game has no graphical issues in the cemetary, and runs at around 12% CPU with software rendering. I guess this is the way I play PS2 games from now on.
No Split-screen Campaign Unbelievably, this game is tagged as local coop on the store, and has a menu where you can enter a coop campaign, and even allows you to start it - but after a countdown, nothing happens. The split-screen campaign was never made! But the game pretends it's still there.
"In order to improve and accelerate ongoing live service development, and to better address player feedback and quality of life updates, we have reallocated studio resources and are no longer working on local campaign split-screen co-op" - 343 Industries, quoted from IGN 2022-09-01
My brother set up a virtual Windows machine that can actually run games, and invited me to Parsec in and play. I played for a few minutes with mouse and keyboard, driving a Jeep and shooting some dudes. It worked flawlessly and felt incredibly responsive. What an incredible era we live in where I can play an action game on a virtual machine through video streaming software and barely noticing that I'm not playing on my own local machine.
Console Clapperboard I came up with an efficient way of recording videos of console games with discrete runs. Before starting the video recording, I go to the dashboard where the current time is visible, note it down on my laptop, and start recording before I go back to the game. When the game is done, I note down if it was worth editing or not. Now I have a recording time and a note about the recording, and I can quickly discard bad recordings when I'm editing.
Sometimes, I don't understand what made an old game a success. Crystal Castles is quite famous. Through a period of 6 years it was ported to 8 home platforms. The Atari ST port got an almost perfect score. I don't get it.
The game is a maze game like Pac-Man from an isometric perspective. That's cool, I like those. It is one of the first isometric games, only preceeded by Congo Bongo, Q*bert, and a few more. It has a quite different style from those, an abstract, almost cyberspace-like look, and several levels have big letters as part of the geometry. It's weird, but neat. The bear and trees and other stuff populating these levels don't really fit that well, but it's OK.
However, as a maze game, the level design isn't that great, it commits the maze game sin of double-wide paths with dots in many levels. But the worst part is the controls. It is played with a trackball, and unlike Marble Madness, where you are rolling a ball freely over open surfaces, here you are constrained to the cardinal directions in most cases. A trackball feels really awkward for this, and to make it worse, the game is insanely fast. It feels messy and frustrating. I don't understand what people like about this game.
Today we were playing on the couch with my laptop as screen, doing remote play with my workstation. I kept the joypad connected to the workstation for minimal latency (inspired by Stadia).
2024-04-14
Malu and I were discussing how to play this game in coop. The game doesn't have a split-screen mode, and it only runs on PS5. We only have one of those, so I needed an other option. I ended up buying it on Steam, which I already know should work with cross-play. The first time you start the game, you are forced to sign in to a PlayStation account. Signing in to my own PS account was scary, what if the game didn't support cross-play with yourself? The first couple of times we tried joining each other it didn't work, but eventually, it did, and we can play together, two syltefars against the universe.
This is embarassing, but I never managed to find any of the super secrets. Tonight I couldn't sleep - still jet lagged from GDC, I supposed - and started to investigate.
Somewhat Spoiled
I didn't stay completely unspoiled, I knew that there were codes hidden in the environments and should be input in a normal key code area, that the codes might be longer than 5 inputs. I had seen a hint image with 5 symbols on it, that seemed to indicate the numbers 2-5 and a diamond shape. I knew that one of the codes was hidden in the sounds of a reflecting shield in Sun world, and I thought I knew one was hidden in some red grooves in the columns in Cloak world after 29% (the red groove count from left-to-right being 35124), and one on the pipes of the pipe puzzle, possibly encoded as little bumps on the pipes. However, I think those last two might have been dropped during development.
I couldn't get the pipe puzzle code to make sense, and I tried to input the one I spotted in the columns (35124) many times in every key code input without any luck.
Unlearning Wrong Knowledge
I looked at the hint image and scrubbed through a playthrough video and found the symbols along with two more symbol rows in the secret area around 84%.
The diamond shape looked different than the others, which I interpreted as it being a 0. I decided that symbols represented the side count of the symbol polygons, which is the way I normally remember the codes - 0, 2, 3, 4, 5.
The symbols then spelled out the code:
2 3 0 5 4
0 5 2 3 4
3 2 4 5 0
I tried to input the full 15-digit code in every key input in the game, all failing.
What was wrong?
Cheating
Frustrated, I watched a few seconds of a hint video on YouTube. After seeing 3 code inputs in the video, I quickly realized that my interpretation of the symbols was wrong. The code in the video started with the sequence 2,3,1 when counting the inputs from left-to-right!
I rewrote the codes with diamond as a 1:
2 3 1 5 4
1 5 2 3 4
3 2 4 5 1
I went back to 24% and tested it out and it worked!
I think my knowledge of development stuff and my own memo technique for the key inputs had confused me needlessly. But now I understand, and I just have to find those symbols in the rest of the game.
My understanding is that every code is in the world where the corresponding key input is, which should make it slightly easier.
I'm currently not producing enough videos to keep up the insane pace of releasing one video per day on YouTube, which I've been doing for years, resulting in almost 3000 videos on my channel. I've decided to start releasing fewer videos, and try to improve the presentation instead. My first step towards this is to add little bumpers with text with some basic info about each game. Getting this to work was quite a journey, where I had to learn how to generate text and concatenate clips using ffmpegs filter_complex option (which is quite tricky). I now have a script where I can run a few scripts to generate clips with info text, and concatenate clips, as well as crop and scale them correctly based on game platform. For reference, here is the ffmpeg command-line I had to generate for my first Phantasy Star II video:
This table was so cool for a huge Simpsons fan like me. Great colors, many details, and voice samples from the series.
2024-02-17
I was in Las Vegas for the DICE awards, and Erwin and I took a trip to the 'Pinball Hall of Fame', a wonderful place for anyone who likes old pinball machines and arcade games. I spent $20 in a couple of hours playing as many machines as I possibly could.
When the grid lines are being drawn, it happens over several frames, and you can see individual lines being drawn.
2024-01-08
I investigated the VRAM tile data in Mednafen, and it seems like the maps are not made using hardware tiles, but rather, the whole screen is directly represented in VRAM, emulating a frame buffer. When the hexagonal tiles are drawn as an overlay, they are drawn to the VRAM tile data. Implementing a frame buffer for a strategy game where the background is rarely updated makes sense.
2024-01-08
I've been thinking about how games with hexagonal grids and tile-based backgrounds work together. Home computer strategy games has had hex grids since 1979, but it's more rare in console games. Rendering a hexagonal grid on framebuffer-based hardware isn't very complicated, but doing it using tiles is less trivial. I noticed that certain strategy games of the 8-bit and 16-bit generation such as 'Nobunagas Ambition' (1986) which was ported to everything had hex grids on home computers but rectangular tiles on consoles where every other horizontal tile is offset half a tile. This implies the same neighbor relationship as with a hex grid, but is much simpler to implement on tile-based hardware. This game and Master of Monsters are early examples of nice looking hex grids on a console that only has tile-based backgrounds and no framebuffer.
I got the HORI now, put it in PS5 mode (PC mode didn't work on MiSTer), assigned the buttons, and it seems to work very well for the Nintendo 64. The controller feels good, the buttons are precise microswitches, the D-pad is great, and the joystick feels good with a nice smooth octagonal gate. I'm proud of my solution to the N64 controller problem, and the HORI should come in very handy for playing fighting games on the PS5 as well.
2023-10-22
Some of the games give me trouble because of the weird N64 controller layout. My main problem are the 4 C-buttons, which are next to A and B on the right side of the controller: they don't map well to any controller with 4 buttons on the right side. I searched a bit for USB N64 controllers and adapters, but think I found an even better solution:
The 'HORI Fighting Commander OCTA for PS5' works with fighting games on the PS4/5 and has 6 buttons on the right side. This might just work well for emulating a N64 controller, as I can map △/○/R1/R2 to the C-buttons, and it has more or less the same D-pad and joystick configuration as the N64 controller. We'll see if it works.
When using headphones plugged into the PS5 controller, the PS5 doesn't output audio to the TV, which means I record no audio on the Elgato. Mission 9 recording was lost due to this mistake. I think this game is cursed.
2023-07-28
My SanDisk Ultra 256 GB SD card seems to have died recording this game. It's been used a lot, so it's fair that it's retiring now. I will order a new one.
I never played a SG-1000 game before. This is the predecessor to the Sega Mark III, also known as the Master System outside Japan. The games on this system have a similar look to them due to a fixed 256x192 resolution, a fixed 16-color palette, and 32 monochrome sprites. The ColecoVision MiSTer core both emulates the ColecoVision and the SG-1000, due to these two systems sharing the same CPU (Zilog Z80), same video display controller (Texas Instruments TMS9918), and same sound chip (Texas Instruments SN76489, also used in both the Master System and the Genesis). The original MSX computers also shared Z80 and the TMS9918 video display controller.
The CRT display is mounted facing upwards, reflected towards a semi-transparent mirror, behind which is a plastic cutout of the planetary surface. The reflection of the CRT appears over the cutout, serving as a backdrop. The CRT had colored overlays on the display itself, to add color to the black and white image. Thus, both the colors and background of Space Invaders are non-digital optical effects. Also note that the actual CRT image is mirrored to appear correct in the reflection. (Photo by dbrainjr on ebay.com)
2023-06-18
For a while now, I've been using a custom MiSTer video filter with interpolation and subtle horizontal scanlines. Everything looks great, but I realized that arcade games with vertical monitor orientation should have vertical scanlines, not horizontal ones. I never really looked for this, but confirmed it with YouTube videos of the real arcade hardware. I have now made a corresponding vertical video filter for games like Space Invaders.
The host of this site was down between June 10th and today due to a hardware failure. I felt a bit homeless in this time, because this and other of my websites were down, but the main problem was in my work, where we use this host as a production server for our company. Now it's back up and I can log that we have been playing and enjoying the early parts of Diablo IV a lot, and we are now around level 25. I'm playing Beastor, a druid were-bear that destroys everything in its path, and Malu is a sorcerer, freezing and burning enemies with powerful magic. The game is great, character building is complex but well-explained in a way that reminds me of Magic: the Gathering - I'm particularly impressed with how well-designed the skill tree is. The game also seems well-balanced on World Tier II, it's mostly easy, and then, once in a while, the challenge makes it feel exciting. The graphics is amazingly detailed, and sound design and music is very satisfying.
I received my no-name NES controller, which according to the packaging is '100% Quality'. It actually feels good, I played a bit of Mega Man, and it works as expected.
I received the Retro Bit SEGA Mega Drive 6-B - my first official Genesis hardware, new in box - and set it up on the MiSTer. The controller feels exactly like my old 6-button Genesis controller, it feels good and responsive, and the cable is nice and long.
I'm setting an Everdrive-style shortcut Down+Start for the OSD.
I considered using the MODE button for OSD. This button was added to the 6-button controller to be able to switch the controller to a backwards compatible 3-button mode during game startup in the few games that didn't support the 6-button controller, but as it turns out, the MODE button is a normal button, and several games use it for in-game functionality, so it should be mapped correctly on the Retro Bit.
I got my Joy-iT gamepad in the mail, and tested it out on the MiSTer. It kind of feels like a SNES controller, but the D-pad is really mushy and it doesn't feel good. The original controller has the same problem, but I think it's even worse in this clone controller.
I also realized that it's quite annoying to not have a OSD button on the controller (opens the MiSTer menu to select a new core/game). In the MiSTer menu, you can set up a button combo for OSD, and I want to use an Everdrive-style shortcut Down+Start for the OSD.
I ordered a bunch of USB retro controllers for playing MiSTer games. I don't know if they are good quality or not.
For the Genesis, I got a Retro Bit SEGA Mega Drive 6-B, which is a semi-transparent blue 6-button Genesis controller. I preferred the black one, but it's sold out. There are several versions of this controller, which lead me to accidentally order the wrong one:
A 6-button joypad with a DE-9 connector, which works with the original console (which I accidentally ordered and cancelled)
A 6-button joypad with a USB-connector (which I ordered instead)
An 8-button joypad with a USB-connector (I don't want extra buttons, the reason I wanted to buy retro controllers is to simplify controls when playing on the MiSTer)
An 8-button joypad with 2.4G wireless connection
For the SNES, I got a Joy-iT gamepad.
For the NES, I got what is seemingly a no-name one.
I hope they work, but if they don't, they weren't that expensive.
After having recorded a lot of games for YouTube, including games from 50 years ago, and even VR games, it feels almost strange that I can't capture the experience of playing Doom in 120 FPS at all. Right now, Doom can only be seen in 120 FPS if you are physically in front of the appropriate hardware. I guess that's the way it always was before the 2000s.
The company bought a PlayStation VR2, and I tried going through the setup process. The eye tracking was amazing to try for the first time. The calibration tool has little dots that you can look at to trigger sounds of different pitches. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was playing an instrument with my eyes, a fascinating experience. I played a bit of Resident Evil, it plays more or less like RE7 in VR. The 3D audio was very effective, I clearly heard the direction of the blinking light from the car. In the first house with the spooky werewolf sounds, I noticed another PSVR2 feature - the headset rumble, which was used very efficiently to anticipate a loud sound.
I colored all dinosaurs and got all RetroAchievements.
2023-01-19
This ... game ... fits right into my current interests of getting RetroAchievements and games with cool dinosaurs. Mindlessly buttoning through and selecting white for every surface is probably the quickest way of getting all the RetroAchievements.
I played both the Japanese and Western releases of this for RetroAchievements. It's fun, except that I can't get the 'play without doing X'-style achievements to work. The Japanese version is much easier to deal with, because you can spam the punches extremely quickly compared to the Western version.
I learned that you can emulate a joypad on the MiSTer by setting up keyboard keys in the system menu and then pressing ScrollLock or NumLock to switch modes when a core is loaded. I set up the keys like I normally do, ASDF for directions, JKL; for face buttons, and UI for shoulder buttons. Thus, key mappings for console games will work like I expect them to. However, for mapping this to an 6-button arcade system is less obvious. I ended up setting up the same mapping I would have on Super Street Fighter II on SNES, which I think of as the canonical fighting game console port.
This game doesn't have a CPU or ROM memory, and the rocket graphics is actually represented directly on the board as diodes. The art for the space ship are clearly visible in both the schematics and the physical board:
Giant Bomb and a bunch of other companies owned by Red Ventures was recently sold to Wikia, the commercial game wiki Wikipedia sister project. I always get a little bit nervous when this kind of thing happens, because it reminds me that the future of these sites is never guaranteed. This made me think about which sites I have used the most to build syltefar.com . I'm now building a list of my primary references, which might serve as a good starting point for game history researchers.
Starting games from disk on the TRS-80 is not trivial. Here is what I figured out:
In MiSTer OSD:
Mount disk 0: NEWDOS*.DSK
Mount disk 1: [game disk]
List game files:
DIR 1
Example files:
APSHAI/JCL <- chain file (script, like a BAT file)
SWAMP/CMD <- binary
STUFF/BAS <- BASIC program
Starting APSHAI/JCL:
chain apshai
Starting SWAMP/CMD:
swamp
Starting STUFF/BAS:
basic runstuff/bas
I have now spent a few days with the Steam Deck, and I have a few thoughts about it. I think it's a very nice piece of hardware, from the size of the screen and the controls and the build quality, to how capable the hardware is of running PC games without a hitch. The fan is quiet most of the time, and the battery life ended up being better than I expected: I managed to play a bunch of older or less demanding games for almost a whole 4 hour train trip on a single charge. However, the most surprising part for me was how polished and well-designed the software is. The Steam Deck compatibility ratings are cleverly designed to clearly show what works, while still allowing you to experiment with games that might not work. And the compatibility of the 10 games I have played so far was perfect, save for a minor UI scaling issue with Titan Quest. I think the Steam Deck is amazing, and although I don't really need a handheld gaming device, this seems like the one to get for me.
I have added Steam Deck as it's own system. It's not obvious whether it is a separate game system or not, as it is basically a handheld PC running a Linux variant. My motivation for adding it as a platform is that even though Steam OS is based on Arch Linux, it is still a separate OS. A similar situation is the Xbox One that runs a modified version of Windows. Like a console, the Steam Deck has well-defined hardware specifications and controls. All the Steam Deck games already run on other platforms, but you could say the same for Google Stadia or Apple's tvOS, which I already decided to add as systems. I felt that playing the Steam games on the Steam Deck shouldn't be listed as playing them on Windows, which is just incorrect, and adding them as Linux games also seems wrong, if only because the games are running on a handheld system, which is very much not the traditional Linux gaming experience.
The site was getting real slow, it took around 5 seconds to reload a gamelog page. I had to optimize it. Getting the system names for a gamelog page took around 4 seconds. I made a quick system name cache, and now getting the system names takes 0.00 seconds. Big improvement.
2022-04-12
The whole recording space issue was starting to annoy me, so I went with option 1 and bought a 4 TB SSD instead. That should allow for more than 100 hours of footage.
I'm shocked at how prolific Psygnosis was in the late 1990s. In 1997 to 1999, Psygnosis released 11-12 internally developed games or ports of internally developed games *every year*. And several of the games were actually quite good!
I immensely enjoy playing and recording the game. This is turning into a problem.
I have set the Elgato 4KS+ to record at 80,000 Kbps = 80 Mbps = 10 MB/s = 60*60*10 GB/h = 36 GB/h
My videos are typically a little less than an hour, which ends up around 30 GB
YouTube processing of a 30G 4K HDR video currently takes 1-3 days, on average around 2 days
So, getting these 4K HDR videos on YouTube has a throughput of less than 30 minutes / day.
So, without any other complications, if I'm recording more than 30 minutes / day, recordings will start to pile up on my SSD.
In the last 22 days, I have recorded over 33 hours of elden ring, which ends up around 1.5 hour / day.
While I'm slowly uploading edited videos to YouTube and waiting for them to process, I have currently a nightmarish 1.2 TB of raw Elden Ring footage on my SSD, slowly filling up the 2 TB.
I have 3 options:
Buy more SSDs. This might impact my bank account too much.
Record less Elden Ring. This is barely an option, the game is just too good.
Edit the videos harder, so YouTube only have to process roughly a third of the footage. I should probably go with that one.
I bought a cheap 'Infrared Ray Inductor' to replace my Wii and its sensor bar. Like the Nintendo sensor bar, it's just a couple of battery-powered infrared lights. I verified the infrared lights being on with my phone camera, and I played a bit of Duck Hunt, and it seems to work perfectly.
2022-03-21
I figured out to use a Wiimote as a NES Zapper! I set up an old Wii connected to the sensor power to provide it power, connected the wiimote to the MiSTer via Bluetooth, set up a peripheral as Zapper(Joy1) and the Zapper Trigger as 'Joystick', configured the Zapper button in the button configuration, and now I can shoot ducks with a Wiimote.
I have settled on Director's Cut being the best version to try, as it seems to be more or less the same as the original Japanese Bio Hazard, with a slightly better handgun.
As the PSX MiSTer core is maturing rapidly, I started looking at the prospect of having a complete collection of PlayStation games on it. PlayStation games are on CDs, up to 700 MB and there are almost 8000 games for it. A complete collection is not practical yet, so I had to find a reasonable subset.
The 'Redump' collection of US-released PlayStation games is 500 GB, packed with 7-zip. Extracted, it will take up maybe 25% more, around 630 GB. My old MiSTer SD card has 256 GB total. I needed some new hardware.
I bought a SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I 1 TB for 1000 DKK and did a clean MiSTer install. I can copy the games from the old SD card, and will still have plenty of space for all the US PSX games and even a few Japanese and PAL exlusives.
I have been supporting Robert Peip aka 'FPGAZumSpass' on Patreon since he announced he was going to make a MiSTer PSX core. Today I booted the first PSX game on an early beta PSX core. The Activision logo didn't look right, but the game started up. No sound yet, though.
I realized that I enjoy a specific type of late 1980s, early 1990s-style war game, where you are slowly weakening an enemy base by destroying its defenses one by one. It includes the spiritual predecessor of this game, Zeewolf, but also Fire Power (1987) and its sequel Return Fire (1996), Desert Strike (1992) and its sequels, as well as Carrier Command (1988).
I have dubbed this genre Base Attack.
The last song Selene and her mother hears on the radio is Don't Fear The Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult (1976). The first line in the verse of the song goes C-B-A-G-G, it's the theme that Selene plays on the piano in the cut-scenes, and a theme that is present in almost the entire soundtrack, even in the same key. Very clever.
I got my new PS5, connected it, spent some time figuring out that HDCP was enabled per default, and the Elgato couldn't pass the signal through. After that, I started up Astro's Playroom and went through the Cooling Springs level with Malu. We got all the collectibles in that area, I think. The game is charming and the haptic feedback and adaptive trigger implementation is astoundingly good.
This game runs on the Sega VCO Object hardware, which implements sprite scaling by using oscillators to control how data is read from sprite ROM. Fascinating stuff.
Area X looks great, and the music implementation seems way better than the original levels, but I don't like the Child of Eden-style aesthetics as much.
Eric Chahi's VR game was an intense and beautiful experience for me. In the beginning, I was awestruck by the amazing universe, and terrified by dark caves and the digging animal. Roly Porter's astounding soundtrack is probably my favourite soundtrack this year. The game slowly turns into a terrain-deforming god game, similar to From Dust (2011). The universe is very original, yet reminiscent of classic science fiction animations by the amazing Karl Sims, specifically the budding fractal plants of 'Panspermia' (1990) and the wobbly low-poly creatures of 'Evolved Virtual Creatures' (1994).
I just purchased the 'Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality' on itch.io, a massive bundle with 1,704 'items' (games and ... assets?), which would normally be 9,349 $, but is now on sale for 5 $ as a donation to NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community Bail Fund, which seems like fine causes. I payed the average 10 $. 814,678 people have donated a total of over 8 million $ by buying this bundle. That's a serious amount of money!
Due to COVID-19, my MiSTer has been stuck in Queens, New York for 40 days. Now it's finally gotten through the distribution center, and should be on its way here.
2020-04-07
I just ordered a MiSTer FPGA from misteraddons.com. I have never played around with an FPGA before, and the concept itself seems completely magical to me. The MiSTEr seems like an incredibly well-supported project with the most hardcore enthusiasts doing their best to make the ultimate emulation box. Apart from the Terasic DE10-Nano board with the Intel Cyclone V FPGA (150 $), I ordered 128MB SDRAM (60 $), a USB Hub (40 $), a cooling system (15 $), and a case (50 $), an 256 GB SD card (50 $), and a few other things for a total of 405 $. A new PS4 is 422 $, but never mind that.
I was visiting the Brooklyn Barcade, the original arcade bar, for my birthday with Malu. It's a very lively and charming place serving craft beer to a room packed full of excited Brooklyn residents. Noone was playing the Arkanoid machine in the corner next to the restrooms and the quarter dispenser. I never tried Arkanoid with a real paddle controller, it felt exactly how I imagined - smooth and responsive.
I played through the tutorial missions on my work computer, and recorded using 'Radeon Software', which worked seamlessly after disabling my second screen and enabling desktop recording.
I just made a RetroAchievements account and tried playing Jackal on the RANes emulator. It's a mod of FCEUX with support for achievements. I got 4 achievements from playing through the first level.
I took a chance and published my full story mode playthrough today, before anyone else on YouTube. I had a couple of fun hours watching the video get over 10K views, before it was taken down by a Warner copyright claim. It's completely fair, I just hope that I can release the video later.
2019-04-18
I just beat the Story Mode in 5 hours. Very easy, more cutscenes than gameplay, but still extremely entertaining. There was a lot of over-the-top costume drama with giant battles, and lots of cool callbacks to earlier games. Very hard not to like.
I've changed the name of the site from ocdgamer.dk to syltefar.com . There are now a whole bunch of sites and YouTube channels called OCD gamer or something similar, some of them gamers with actual OCD, and my dumb joke site name seems less funny now. From now on this site will go by my earliest game account name - 'syltefar' - from back in 2008 when I made my Xbox account. I hope that I'll be able to stay the one and only syltefar on the internet.
The game came out at midnight exactly, and I went straight into completing JOURNEY MODE. That last level with 90 lines to clear was really difficult, and I had to retry it many times. JOURNEY MODE is cool, if a bit short.
I wanted an invincibility cheat. The player hit points is a byte value $00-$30 stored at address $04A6. I wanted a cheat that set this value to $30 whenever it was accessed. In the cheat interface, I did this the following way:
> 2 (Cheat Search...)
> 1 (Add Cheat)
Name: hits
Type: S (Substitue on reads)
Address: $4a6
Value: $30
Enable? Y
2018-11-08
I wanted to record a video of my ROM-hacked end sequence of the game, and since I really haven't played this before, I decided to learn how to cheat in the Mednafen emulator. I found the relevant addresses on thealmightyguru.com and figured out how to use Mednafen's neat cheat interface, which seems a bit underdocumented right now. The cheat interface is accessed by pressing Alt-c and the game is frozen while you enter codes (including video recording).
2018-11-08
I never played this game before, but when I decided to do my first ROM hack of this particular game, I spent the last many hours getting to know the game a little better.
After 6 years, 432 games on PS4, hundreds of games Xbox 360, and a few games on Windows and Vita, I finally completed Spelunky by digging a big hole for Olmec with bombs and luring him into it.
I was playing this game in the strangest possible way: At work, during a bathroom break, on my Samsung Android phone running terminal emulator Termius, connected to the very server that is currently hosting this website, using the great terminal multiplexer tmux to take notes :D. This was where I figured out that I could enter a sequence of movements like this:
d,d,w,w,u,s,e,e,e,e,s
This is how you get from the second floor of the Computer Center (currently my base) to the Alchemy Lab.
2018-04-07
I tried playing this game again, recording a video including some improvised ambient horror music playing in the background. I have not found a way to get past that maintenance man.
Damn, I streamed Nioh for 9 hours and had 129 viewers along the way. Crazy.
2017-11-22
Without intending to, I played Nioh the whole day. It's very enjoyable while also being frustratingly hard. I finished the Chugoku Region, defeating the Blob boss with lots of fire attacks, discovering too late that you can apply fire to your weapon from the burning pyres in the boss arena. Oh well. I moved on to the spidery Kinki Region, and fought a spiderlady. Every boss fight seems to be a monster lady. Someone at Team Ninja has an unhealthy fixation, I guess.
I had a lot of Souls, and wanted to level up, but when I talked to The Maiden in Black, she transported me to the final area, a wonderful desolate ruined beach, the home of the magnificent Old One, a tree growth-covered monstrocity. I entered the mouth of the Old One, and found the horrible wretched remains of King Allant XII. He was transformed into a grotesque slug-like creature, the only reminder of his past humanity being the Soulbrandt sword held in his deformed right hand. I took mercy to the creature and quickly killed it. After that, I was told by the Maiden in Black to leave. It did so, and the game ended.
My colleagues and I played an epic session of Helldivers, the goal of which was to unlock a boss battle and defeat the boss. We played a couple of bug missions to gain the required influence to unlock the boss battle planet, and then we got a 3 hour deadline to defeat the boss itself. Some of my colleagues, more optimistically minded than me, didn't expect the battle to take that long. But they were proven wrong, as the battle against the horrible bug boss commenced, forcing us to use all our potential, optimize our equipment, and develop new team tactics. In the end, it wasn't enough. At our best, we managed to get the big critter down to around 30%, but alas, as we got more tired, our concentration failed, and ultimately the deadline hit, and we had to give up. Helldivers still ranks among the very top of cooperative games in book.
As the train pulled into Aalborg Station, I had finished practising dodging the incredibly annoying flying disembodied hands of the final boss, and started the final checkpoint for real. The trick here was to keep shooting normal shots at the hands, and after hitting them around 20 times, they would be sucked into the other dimension. The final part of the boss fight is a little puzzle where you have to fire your force unit back into the mouth of the boss. I entered the ending sequence, as the train pulled to a halt, and today, 11 years after I started playing R-Type III, I finally finished it.
A new Beast is coming soon, and I felt like putting a little work into the Amiga original. I'm playing on FS-UAE, and made a save state in the Castle, so I can practice.
I streamed my early hours in Bloodborne to Twitch using the PlayStation 4's built-in streaming feature.
I have thought about what makes the gameplay of Bloodborne more a pleasurable experience to me than Dark Souls II. Since the games are very similar, it is mostly a question of Dark Souls annoyances that has been removed in Bloodborne. Here are some of the changes:
Your health doesn't decrease when you die. Much less stressful.
Monsters won't stop respawning, which means you are able to grind character levels, which seems important to adjust the game's difficulty.
No inventory encumbrance.
Your attacks are not blocked by walls. Attacks also seem to be designed for hitting enemies, instead of you having to carefully position yourself to avoid just swinging into thin air.
2015-03-26
I spent my first night in Yharnam tonight. I went into the sewers, got the Plague from a filthy Ratman, I killed a whole group of pitchfork-wielding dudes, and was slain by the mighty Cleric Beast. I like the game so far, the combat is fun and the world of Bloodborne is a wondrous place in all of its gothic glory.
This Sunday, I armed myself with a MC6800 manual and Visual Studio, and made a working Defender sound board emulator in C++. It currently only plays the boot sound, because I haven't implemented the full instruction set yet.
Even though I was so happy to get an NES from Jeppe and Peter, the timing issues with the PAL NES has bothered me enough to buy a NTSC one to replace it. I bought a refurbished one from Lukie Games including Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt, two controllers, and the Zapper. The whole thing was 180 USD (1174 DKK).
Hmm... Was this the game that unironically coined the phrase 'prosecuted to the full extent of the jam'? Amazing, I never realized. I guess that the letters of 'jam' read upside down, look like 'law'.
One of the games I got with my awesome new NES, Pin-Bot is an impressive pinball simulation on the lowly NES, and a pretty weird game with a lot of mysterious and confusing features such as replacing the ball with a rock, small flying enemies, and changing the colors of the table.
Oh, right, my Narco Police floppy has a special title theme, replacing the awful music of the original with a better track by myself. That's pretty unique. :)
The Lovecraft inspiration is not subtle. Game starts out with a dream sequence with an ancient horror. Also, there is a network node called 'Lovecraft'.
2014-07-10
I managed to install the Infocom interpreter, frotz, on my Linux machine, and copied the game data files over. Now, it's a Linux game.
2014-07-10
I never played a lot of text adventures, as my english skills weren't good enough when the genre was at its peak (I was about 10 years old at the time). I used to read Fighting Fantasy books, which were similar, and I also made a short Warhammer 40K text adventure on the Amiga. But didn't really play any of the computer text adventures. 'The Lurking Horror' is supposedly one of the best of its kind; it takes place at a university in 'present day', meaning the 80s, and it seems to be inspired by H. P. Lovecraft. If I were ever to summon the motivation needed to play a text adventure, this would probably be the game.
After a few humble attempts at figuring out the systems of this ancient game, I think I got the hang of it. I'm traveling around the galaxy at warp speed, exploring the galactic map, destroying Klingon warbirds with carefully aimed photon torpedos, and regularly returning to a Federation star base to recharge and repair. I'm playing the C# game on my Linux server, accessible from everywhere, which means I can take a few actions during a coffee break or before I go to sleep. I still have 6/17 Klingons left to kill...
Played for hours today, the game is getting a bit more tricky, and the fast pace and maneuverability of Strider Hiryu makes for a fun action-filled experience.
REGISTRATION! In 1998, no-one except me and my friends knew anything about the obscene amounts of Tekken 3 we played. Now, things are a bit different. I just started Tekken Tag Tournament 2 for the first time, and here is the sequence of steps I went through: First the game told me that it had to update itself. Next, in the main menu, I selected online play, and the game told me to enter 25-digit code to download an online pass, after which I got a 20-digit code to register the game in the World Tekken Federation website, which keeps stats on my profile (seems really cool). Inside the game box, there was a 12-digit code that I used to register the game at namcobandaigames.eu, where I connected the game to a new profile, which I linked to my Google account. At this site, I can fill out personal information and link to social networks and the like to get free swag like a sweet Pac-man mouse pad that I have my eye on. So I guess it's 1984, and Big Brother is watching me lose in Tekken. And I let him.
YES! Die, Dracula, you annoying piece of trash! I whipped his stupid head off, Holy Watered his monster form and whipped that in the face, jumped over a few bullets, and presto: completed. This game is legendary, and I beat it. Awesome. :)
Similarly to how I solved the annoying puzzles in Onimusha 2 puzzle boxes, I did a quick brute force on the Castlevania rotation puzzle, using the hint that only one-way rotation should be needed:
# Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Pan's Temple puzzle solver by schmid 2012-05-24
moves = [ [-1,+1,-1,"middle RT"], [+1,-1,0,"inner RT"], [0,-1,+1,"outer RT"] ]
def apply(move, puzzle)
(0..2).each do |n| puzzle[n] = (puzzle[n] + move[n]) % 4 end
end
random = Random.new
100000.times do
puzzle = [1,1,1] # start position (0 is north, 1 is east, etc.)
move_list = []
(1..5).each do |m| # shortest solution is 5 moves
move = moves[ random.rand(0...moves.length) ]
apply(move, puzzle) ; move_list += [ move ]
if puzzle == [2,2,2] then # solution is all south
puts "solution:" ; move_list.each { |move| puts move[3] }
exit
end
end
end
Using screenshots from the Hexahedron sequence in the beginning of the game, word length analysis, and a nice guess from Mads Weitling that the word 'Hexahedron' could be one of the words, I figured out most of the letters in the alien alphabet. Using the rest of the text, myself and Andreas from Playdead figured out the rest of the letters and successfully translated the dialogue. Yay!
Although Google had some exceptionally disappointing talks at Game Developers Conference 2012, their party really was something else; they had filled the center of the dancefloor with classic arcade cabinets and pinball tables, and I was able to try many of the classic arcade games for the first time in all of their pure unemulated awesomeness, accompanied by some appropriately hard house from the DJ. This party, pandering as it was, was a unique experience, one I wouldn't have been without. And seeing the original Asteroids on a real vector screen was a revelation. It was so vivid, the ship and the shots glowing with great intensity, looking like nothing a modern screen could reproduce. And, as is usually the case with old games using CRTs, it controlled perfectly without the horrible lag, we have grown accustomed to on our modern displays.
I used to be a pretty serious Transformers fan as a kid in the 80s. I own a sizeable collection of the toys, especially the first generation, such as Sideswipe and Brawl (one of my favorites), both featured in Transformers: War for Cybertron. I spent countless hours playing with them, thinking about them, and pestering my dad to buy more of them. So, needless to say, I have a pretty serious relationship with those guys. Also, as a kid, I used to have some pretty strong opinions about the way Transformers should look, sound, and behave. So strong, that I felt very critical towards essential parts of the franchise, including descriptions on the toy boxes, the Marvel comic books, and the original movie. The childhood experiences have afflicted my grown-up counterpart, as I have retained my feelings about how Transformers are 'supposed' to be, which has kept me from gaining any enjoyment from the Michael Bay movies. Also, I believe they are just awful movies in general. 'Transformers: War for Cybertron' is a game I couldn't even have dreamt of as a kid. It has a grand vision of a wartorn Cybertron, it features classic characters in interesting Cybertronian versions, and a plot with crazy huge moments, intriguing for any Transformers fan. However, as mentioned earlier, I have some pretty specific opinions about Transformers. So how does this game stack up? First, let's look at the obvious: the transforming characters themselves. The characters are as ridiculous and one-dimensional as always; no disappointment here. The game does not really delve into fourth wall-breakage or testicle-based comedy like Michael Bay's work, it has a more serious tone, as if made by grown ups who actually enjoyed the toys as children. The transformations in the game are complex and fast, look reasonably good, except there seems to be some amount of matter appearing and disappearing. I didn't like the same thing in the old comics and the animated movie: the transforming parts were stretched to look good in vehicle and robot forms, which is kind of a cop out. Most Transformers' alternate forms are vehicles, even Megatron and Soundwave. It seems to be a conscious design choice to reduce the number of different types of forms, but unfortunately it makes the transformations themselves much less interesting. The car forms control a bit too similarly to the robot forms - which makes the transitions easier to control, but less interesting. Who ever heard of a side-strafing car? Actually, many of the car forms look straight out of Back to the Future, folding their wheels up to reveal lifter rockets. Very original. Most of the weapons are modelled very closely to weapons of other shooters: you have your assault rifles, pump guns, double-barelled shotguns, grenade launchers. The weapons fire bullets and use ammo. They mostly feel pretty good, but here is what I don't like: Transformers should not fire regular guns, they should have zapping laser beams and missiles. And about Cybertron: I like the general vision of the chaotic, super-complex structure with its weird indigenous life forms, but the actual rendition in the game is less than perfect; the graphics is muddled and confusing to look at. It looks a bit like every graphical filter and effect is turned to max, but the textures and models themselves do not have the required detail and it all just runs together. Transformers: War for Cybertron is a pretty decent third person shooter, the transformation abilities lend the gameplay a little extra depth, which keeps it from being too boilerplate. The fiction and world is handled with enough care, and the story is entertaining enough, but the transformers themselves are a bit lacking in their forms and variety, and the graphics could be better. The game has some suprisingly good multiplayer modes, providing some extra icing on the cake. Even with the caveats mentioned above, I would recommend the game to all Transformers fans - this is probably the best Transformers game ever made - but the rest of you might want to go with another third person shooter. Maybe one that features some sort of chainsaw attached to an assault rifle.
After listening to hours of Jeppe rambling about how great this game is, I've decided to try it. Based on my short experience with its predecessor, Demon's Souls, I don't think I will. But let's see...
I'm playing Tekken 2 on my MacBook Pro sitting on my balcony in a comfortable armchair. The laptop is in the shade, I'm in the hot Cairo sun. I have the next week off, and my friends Jonas and Kanako are coming to visit me from Denmark tonight. Life isn't half bad. Also, I just unlocked P. Jack, which I completely forgot existed. Yeah, P. Jack!
I suck at Mortal Kombat. I have always sucked at Mortal Kombat. I tried the first MK for Amiga, and couldn't figure it out. I enjoyed the gruesomeness of the game (one of my favourites on the Amiga was Barbarian, which has a similar style), but I never got the gameplay. Of course, playing a 5-button game using a 1-button joystick is never going to work all that well. I believe I tried playing MK2 on the Amiga as well, but since the 90s, I basically didn't touch MK before I got into Mortal Kombat: Deception in 2008. Now, I got UMK3 for my awesome SNES, and I'm ready to start training before MK9 is out later this year. I still suck, but I'm slowly getting better.
Bought my first OnLive game for 5$. Right now, OnLive seems completely magical, like something that should not be possible. The latency is really bad, though, but the sheer novelty of the system compelled me to buy a game.
So today was the day when I unboxed my used US SNES from LukieGames. It had been a long time underway, stopping a week in Kastrup for sales tax and the slow wheels of the rusty behemoth that is the danish post office and government. I received it yesterday and today I got a voltage converter for the power supply, courtesy of Brinck Elektronik. Back in from a walk in the cold streets of Copenhagen, at the Tonic Games Højbro Plads office, I connected the console and inserted my Super Mario World cartridge for the first time. Nothing happened. Black screen. We tested that we had the right input on the TV, and all the cables were correctly connected, and rebooted a few times. I was beginning to think that it wouldn't work with the office TV at all, but still tried the Super Street Fighter II cartridge. Immediately, the Capcom logo was on the screen, and soon I was looking at Ryu in awesome SNES graphics. I played a few rounds with my colleagues Jeppe Nielsen and Michal Trzos (kicking their asses), after which I tried the other games I bought, Gradius III, Super R-Type, Mega Man X, Super Castlevania IV, and Zelda: A Link to the Past. All worked. Back to Super Mario World, which still didn't work. Remembering the Angry Video Game Nerd, I tried the magic incantations of blowing on the cartridge contacts, and brushing them with my T-shirt. I inserted the cartridge back into the console, and presto, Super Mario was ready. Now, I have installed the old grey box in my living room, and I'm ready for some good old games.
Phew! That was hard. I finally defeated Dr. Wily, although the boss rush of Bomb Man, Fire Man, Ice Man, and Guts Man was the real problem. I have sort of learned a Bomb Man 'dance' where I follow his jumps around and burn him. Fire Man is a real bitch, he just fires fire walls in rapid succession, and I never figured out how to avoid them, so I just fired ice in his face as quickly as possible. Ice Man is a joke, I can grill him with elektricity before he can even hit me, and Guts Man took a bit of fancy footwork. Dr. Wily himself is quite easy, once you figure out what to do about him. I recorded a video of the last few minutes with the emulator, and uploaded it to YouTube.
Torchlight is my first purchase on Steam. Steam works like a charm, no issues of any kind. Torchlight is a very cool and very Diablo-esque hack-and-slash RPG, and very cheap to boot (16 EUR). Interestingly, it was done in the Ogre open source graphics engine.
Around this time, I was practicing DonPachi with save states and modified game speed in MAME. MAME didn't allow save states for this game because of 'pending anonymous timers'. I ended up downloading the MAME source and compiled my own version where this check was disabled. The DonPachi save states seemed to work fine regardless. Playing in slow motion was rewarding to figure out safe zones and enemy behaviour, and I even practiced in faster speed, to try to learn some general movement patterns.
With the release of the new batch of Xbox 360s (now without guaranteed hardware failure within the first month), I caved in and bought one. The first real game I played on my first 7th generation console was Gears of War. In the beginning, I just couldn't stop walking slowly around and looking at the graphics; and Gears is very nice to look at indeed.
The environment is post-apocalyptic, with streets and houses being transformed into ruined battlegrounds. Just the way I like it. The graphics is extremely detailed, and some objects have simulated newtonian physics, which is new to me (never got into the whole Half Life 2-thing, even though everybody told me I should :). The first dangling corpse I found was my plaything for several minutes, pushing it around and shooting at it. That being said, I believe that the physics in a game like this will seem ridiculous in a few years, when the evolution of that particular game feature will have run its course.
This was my best 1 credit run on MAME. While at Pollux Gamelabs, I recorded a replay, where I beat stages 1-5 without dying and then die over and over again on the beginning of stage 6...
According to my blog from 2006, which was the year when my gamelog started, I was enjoying a lot of japanese games on MAME at the time. Zero Wing was one of the games mentioned for its poor english translation, specifically the famous 'All your base are belong to us' phrase.
I believe this was the version of Moria I played on my Amiga 1200, and the first roguelike game I was exposed to. I can remember finding it fascinating at the time, that when thinking about playing Moria, I was seeing vivid images of dark underground halls dimly lit by a torch, most of which was created by my imagination from playing a game with some very simple graphics. I think I downloaded this game from aminet, which would have been around 1998, when I was studying music science at Aalborg University and had proper access to the internet for the first time in my life.
Shadow of the Beast was extremely impressive in its graphics and music, and it deeply captivated me from the first time I saw a commercial for it in a magazine. Completing it was too hard for me, even though I was pretty methodical, mapping out the enemy placement of the entire game on paper. I once reached the final boss fight with Lord Maletoth before dying, which I consider a great accomplishment...
Me and my brother came up with a great idea: pit the best chess AI from the danish produced Regnecentralen computer, RcSkak, against the brain of Amiga chess game, Chessmaster 2000. Each of us was sitting by a machine, one in the basement, one in my dad's office, yelling the moves back and forth and playing the other computer's moves against the AI. RcSkak was butchered by The Chessmaster. An epic 1980s cross-hardware AI battle.
My friend Jens had this Game & Watch game when we were kids, and once I got to try it, I was immediately hooked. This fast and tricky version of the arcade classic was fun to play and insanely addictive. The game is notable for being the first to feature the modern cross-shaped D-pad.
I had this as a kid, and played it a lot. The graphics consisted of tiny red lights with two different intensities, and the sound was clicking and a characteristic 'beep-beep' when you scored. Movement was fast and in discrete steps, a gameplay style that I have always enjoyed since.
Screenshots marked with 🍒 are created by syltefar and are considered public domain, free to use for anything. If you want to, you can note where you found it and link to this page.
(Photo by dbrainjr on ebay.com)
