syltefar.com

Super Secrets

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:

ffmpeg -y
 -ss 00:00:00.000 -t 00:00:06.000 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/text-intro.mkv
 -ss 00:00:01.516 -t 00:00:39.328 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/4K60_S+_004_001.mkv
 -ss 00:02:50.783 -t 00:14:31.533 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/4K60_S+_004_001.mkv
 -ss 00:00:00.000 -t 00:00:06.000 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/text-grinding.mkv
 -ss 00:00:23.916 -t 00:08:20.298 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/4K60_S+_004_002.mkv
 -ss 00:00:05.996 -t 00:34:19.664 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/4K60_S+_004_003.mkv
 -ss 00:00:00.000 -t 00:06:15.331 -i Genesis/2024-03-10/4K60_S+_004_004.mkv
 -filter_complex "
  [0:v:0][0:a:0][1:v:0][1:a:0][2:v:0][2:a:0][3:v:0][3:a:0][4:v:0][4:a:0]
  [5:v:0][5:a:0][6:v:0][6:a:0]concat=n=7:v=1:a=1[outv_unscaled][outa];
  [outv_unscaled]crop=1216:920:(iw-ow)/2:(ih-oh)/2,scale=iw*2:ih*2[outv]"
 -map "[outv]" -map "[outa]"
 -filter_complex highpass=f=20
 -acodec flac -c:v libx265 -crf 20 -preset ultrafast
 upload/mister-gen-phantasy_star_2-1-2024-03-10.mkv

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.

This table was so cool for a huge Simpsons fan like me. Great colors, many details, and voice samples from the series.

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 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.

When the grid lines are being drawn, it happens over several frames, and you can see individual lines being drawn.

A Development Mystery

'Justice League: Task Force' is a DC Comics fighting game for the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo, a spiritual predecessor to Injustice: Gods Among Us, if you will.

The game itself is less interesting than the story that seems to emerge from the credits listing. That story involves two famous developers working in parallel on two games with the same title and concept, with the involvement of a publisher that went bankrupt before the game came out.

Both developers are legends of the game industry, and they would undergo a big change the year after this game came out.

Fraud and Bankruptcy

This game was published by Acclaim Entertainment, a prolific publisher that started in 1984, publishing games of varying quality for the NES, and was shut down in 2004 due to securities fraud. However, this game was published in 1995, when they were still going strong.

On the title screen, we find a copyright notice by Sun Corporation of America, the US branch of Japanese company Sunsoft. Sunsoft developed and published a bunch of games that included the DC Comics license, such as Superman for the Genesis, the two good NES Batman games, and several more.

However, even though the credits list staff from Acclaim, noone from Sunsoft is present. I started wondering what their involvement had been.

According to segaretro.org, the game came out early 1995. The timing is interesting, because Sun Corporation of America went bankrupt in February 1995 after having lost millions on golf course investments in Palm Springs. So, around the same time as the release of this game.

A possible explanation for the Sunsoft name being in the game could be that they had the original publishing rights, which Acclaim could have bought after Sunsoft saw the writing on the wall. Of course, this is pure speculation.

Blizzard and Condor

On the title screen, it says 'Developed by Condor, Inc.', a name that wasn't immediately familiar to me. As I was first researching the developer, I noticed that there was a SNES version that came out at the same time - with the same publishing credits, but a different developer. The developer was none other than Blizzard Entertainment. In fact, the SNES version has many key developers in common with WarCraft: Orcs & Humans, which came out the year before, sharing producers, artists, and composer.

So, after learning that Blizzard was involved, I was even more curious about who 'Condor, Inc.' were. I could never have guessed that 'Condor, Inc.' was the previous name of Blizzard North! In fact, this version of Justice League was created by developers from the Diablo team, including programmer David Brevik, art by the Schaefer brothers, and music by Matt Uelmen.

So we have the Warcraft team on the SNES Justice League game, and the Diablo team on the Genesis Justice League game.

Condor, Inc. was purchased by Blizzard the year after this game came out. Condor was based in San Mateo, California, and the company that would buy them was in Irvine, California, a 7-hour drive away.

Different Developers, Different Games

A closer look at the SNES and Genesis games reveals something surprising: one is not a port of the other, as I would have expected. Rather, they are different games!

The concept is the same: a Justice League fighting game, but that is where the similarities end. The two games have different sprite art, different backgrounds, and different gameplay.

So, Acclaim would have these two California-based teams working on two different games with the same title and game concept, without ever hooking up and sharing a single sprite or background.

Making new fighting games is hard, I don't know how this seemed like a good idea for Acclaim.

I would love to hear the full story, it has all the elements for great business drama: a well-known license, two legendary companies, bankruptcy, and the mystery of two different games with the same title.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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)

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.

The final campfire rotating disc puzzle was too annoying to solve, so I employed brute force Ruby scripting:

# Final camp puzzle
# Positions are triples [inner, middle, outer]
# - adjusting left is negative, right is positive
start_pos  = [0,0,0]
target_pos = [2,3,4] # relative to start_pos
moves = [
  [" in ->", 1, 0,-3], ["mid ->",  0, 1,-4], ["out ->",-1, 1, 1],
  [" in <-",-1, 0, 3], ["mid <- ", 0,-1, 4], ["out <-", 1,-1,-1] ]
puts "Moveset:"
moves.each do |m| puts m.inspect end

def do_move(pos, move) # rotate 'pos' as specified by 'move'
  [(pos[0]+move[1])%10, (pos[1]+move[2])%10, (pos[2]+move[3])%10]
end

(1..5).each do |move_count|
  print "."
  (0..10000).each do |t| # retries
    pos = start_pos 
    movelist = []
    (0..move_count).each do |m| # try 'move_count' random moves
      move = moves[rand(6)]
      movelist.push(move)
      pos = do_move(pos, move)
      if (pos == target_pos) then # solution found!
        # Moves correspond to vector *addition*, order of moves doesn't matter
        movelist.sort!{|a,b| a[0] <=> b[0]}
        puts "solved in #{move_count} moves after #{t} retries. " +
             "pos:#{pos} target_pos:#{target_pos}"
        puts "start  #{start_pos.inspect}"
        pos = start_pos
        movelist.each do |solution_move|
          pos = do_move(pos, solution_move)
          puts "#{solution_move[0]} #{pos.inspect}"
        end
        exit
      end
    end
  end
end

# solved in 5 moves after 1110 retries. pos:[2, 3, 4] target_pos:[2, 3, 4]
# start  [0, 0, 0]
#  in -> [1, 0, 7]
#  in -> [2, 0, 4]
#  in -> [3, 0, 1]
# mid -> [3, 1, 7]
# mid -> [3, 2, 3]
# out -> [2, 3, 4]

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.

For the first time, we used AI to help us solve a puzzle. The game had a puzzle that included solving the (very simple) equation:

x-100+10+1=1810

I asked ChatGPT to solve it:

x-100+10+1=1810, solve for x

and it gave me the correct answer, 1899.

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 played a little bit on RetroArch on my phone and got a few RetroAchievements. I might be addicted to RetroAchievements.

Completed The Great Waldo Search.

I'm not proud of this. Easy RetroAchievements, though.

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.

Mastered Color a Dinosaur.

I colored all dinosaurs and got all 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.

Controls from page 4 of the manual:

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:

Thanks to the Retrogame Deconstruction Zone for finding this example.

This is a test of my new text rendering, SylteMarkup, based on Markdown. For now, you can make references:

Game links: [Fire Power](@746) Fire Power

Year links: [1987](year:1987) 1987

Images: ![Fire Power screenshot](/images_full/firepower_amiga.png "Description text")

Apart from these special links, it has the usual Markdown stuff, such as bullet lists:

• Hey
• There
• Dude

I have finally restored the video page which has been out of commission since the site redesign. It currently has 2767 entries.

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

Martin Donlon from Treyarch just committed a working MiSTer M72 core where R-Type is working, with sound and everything. I'm so excited for this!

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.

My Xbox 360 MadCatz Arcade FightStick TE doesn't seem to work on the Xbox Series X.

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.

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.

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!

Elden Ring Recording Nightmare

I have a problem with Elden Ring.

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:

1. Buy more SSDs. This might impact my bank account too much.
2. Record less Elden Ring. This is barely an option, the game is just too good.
3. Edit the videos harder, so YouTube only have to process roughly a third of the footage. I should probably go with that one.

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 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.

8000 PSX Games

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.

With this score, we are #8 in the world!

After 30 years of playing RTS games, I have realized something about myself: I don't like story-based RTS campaigns.

To be clear, I love many elements of the RTS genre:

• I like building, commanding, and upgrading tiny units.
• I like building bases, and the pressure of withstanding hordes of attacking enemies.
• I like developing strategies for which unit combinations work best against other unit combinations.
• I like the type of RTS meta-game where you conquer zones in a world map, pioneered by Dune II and later reimagined by Dawn of War: Dark Crusade.

However, what I don't like are campaign missions where a story is told through scripted events on an RTS map, where you move a small group of units around, learning to use their abilities, defending bases, rescuing units.

I don't like that many of the missions will have sequences where the gameplay boils down to moving a single unit or small group of units around and activate their abilities once in a while. When I realized that this is the part I don't like, a question came to mind: Moving a unit using a mouse cursor and activating timed abilities is exactly the gameplay of action RPGs like Diablo. I like Diablo. So why is this type of gameplay fun in Diablo-likes and not in RTSes?

Firstly, the production time spent by a developer on a single hero unit is obviously going to be limited by the number of other units in an RTS. Thus, we wouldn't expect the controls, abilities, and animation to be as sofisticated as those of a Diablo character. Usually the RTS unit will have less refined controls, less abilities, and less detailed animation. So, from the facts of game development, the part of an RTS that plays like Diablo is going to be less refined than Diablo, where this part is the entire game. The Diablo-part of an RTS is going to seem like a 'cheaper' version of Diablo.

Secondly, I think games like Diablo keep your attention by leveling up your character and making them more powerful as you play, making earlier enemies easier to defeat, and enabling using new loot. These elements are rarely present in RTSes, and even if they are, they will be pretty shallow. The progression in these sequences are then mostly based on getting through a mission, rather than empowering your character.

Most story-based RTS campaigns don't reinvent the wheel, but fall back on these types of missions pioneered by games like StarCraft. Many players seemed to enjoy this type of campaign in 1998, and RTS developers retained these tropes since.

I don't enjoy playing this type of campaign anymore, and I might resign to just focusing on skirmish modes, where you just play matches against AI enemies.

I wish that RTS developers would focus on making a simple but effective metagame such as conquering world maps or leveling up your units. The missions themselves should be based on the core gameplay that make RTSes unique: building bases and commanding groups of units.

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 was investigating the dynamic music of this for a Sonic College lecture and made a small recording. This game is amazing, I need to play it again.

Overall, I think Death Stranding is a great game, and original to its core. The gameplay is intentionally slow and the actions you're performing are the opposite of action-packed. However, great care and attention has been given to how these tasks are performed to make them nuanced and satisfying. You explore maps that are lonely and desolate, yet very beautifully rendered.

The world of Death Stranding is nuts in a typical Kojima-like fashion, but it has a quiet melancholic tone that is unique for this game. It is also intensely surreal: babies in bottles, teleportation umbrellas, flying tar whales, floating highways with rocks floating in the air. This level of surrealism seems rare in modern games. The character drama mainly unfolds through relatively few cutscenes, many of them close to the end of the game. It doesn't work for me. Even though I think the faces in this game are rendered and animated better than anything I have seen in games so far, the characters that are portrayed don't have emotional resonance. The best example of this is Die-Hardman's emotional scene with Sam near the end of the game. He breaks down with tears dripping from his eyes in what should be a very effective acting performance. The face of Die-Hardman is incredibly well-rendered, with perfect eye movement, and even down to intricate details in the furrows of his eyebrow. However, nothing has been done in the game to make this a character the player should care about. After playing for 70 hours, this is the first time we see the character's face, as well as the first time we see him exhibit any form of emotion. The resulting feeling is awkward: we're seeing scene that *seems* like it should be very emotional, but for a character that means nothing to us. So the storytelling is not always great, but what did work for me was the quiet, underplayed bond between Sam and his Bridge Baby Lou. Lou is always there, doing cute baby things that are hard not to enjoy, and Sam clearly misses his adoptive child when he's taken away, shown in a few quiet moments where Sam forgets that Lou is gone and speaks to her, and then realizing she's gone, and goes quiet. This is effective video game storytelling, and it involves characters that have been on the screen for hours and hours. Ultimately, even though the drama doesn't always work, the story and world was fascinating enough to keep my attention securely locked through a very long game.

Even with the caveats about the character drama, Death Stranding has a lot to enjoy. A game with this level of originality that still has high production values is rare. For this reason, Death Stranding will stand out in gaming history for years to come.

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.

Completed Astro's Playroom. That was a lot of fun!

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.

Completed Rez Infinite. 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.

Completed Paper Beast. 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 got it now! And it works!! However, I can't get Pac-Man to run at all. But the consoles work, and it's awesome.

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!

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.

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.

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 think this was my first 4K 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.

Completed Mortal Kombat 11. 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 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.

The Early Videos

I recently published the 1000th video on the OCDgamer YouTube channel, an account that I created in 2006. I was fascinated with the idea of recording videos of games and putting them online, and the first game video uploaded to my channel was from the weird PS3 game Noby Noby Boy, which had built-in YouTube upload support. I recorded 50 seconds of weird snake creature tangled around a rotating thing from a friend's PS3, and uploaded the video on March 28th, 2009. I looked at the metadata for the video, and learned that the filename uploaded from the game is

o----o.mp4

, an adorable little ASCII Noby Noby Boy worm.

The second video I uploaded was more exciting, it was an input recording from March 2010 of me beating the original Mega Man for NES. The final 10 minutes of the game included a difficult boss rush and a final boss fight. The emulator supported recording my key presses, and I could replay the input and record an .AVI after having beaten the game. I uploaded the result to YouTube.

These kinds of videos were fun, but I didn't have a good general way of recording from Xbox 360 and PS3 games. However, that didn't stop me, and in 2011 and 2012, I recorded a bunch of videos with a laptop camera pointed towards the TV. The games I have horrible quality videos of include Uncharted 2, Gatling Gears, Transformers: War for Cybertron, and Gears of War 2.

December 2013 I bought myself a PlayStation 4, and a few months later I used the built-in video recording and uploaded a difficult boss fight in glorious 720p 30 FPS of the PS4 Strider game. This was the future of game recording: built-in recording in the console, with a button for capturing a video of a number of minutes of gameplay back in time.

Later that year, I started streaming gameplay live to the very popular video streaming service, Twitch, and, because Twitch isn't very suitable for my style of video recording, I downloaded the video files from Twitch and reuploaded them to YouTube. In 2015, I started making long streams of my first playthrough of Bloodborne. From the PC, I also started streaming using OBS, the first games I recorded were Diablo, Elite: Dangerous, and Diablo III, and later on, I would stream emulated games such as Dig Dug, Jackal, and over 7 hours of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in two videos. The longest marathon session was 6 hours of Dark Souls III in May 2016. I wasn't even trying to stream for a long time, it just turned out that way:

In September 2018, I bought an Elgato HD60 that captures 1920x1080 at 60 FPS via USB. I use OBS to stream it to YouTube and record an offline copy. They are running at 4 MB/s, which is the maximum bandwidth I can reliably upload to YouTube.

9 Years Later

Now that the channel has been up for 9 years, the videos have been gathering views, most of them in very low numbers. I have not advertised them anywhere, so I wouldn't expect them to. However, a few of them have been seen by a lot of people: When I streamed Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 to YouTube on the hour of its release, the stream had a lot of views, and it is still the most viewed video on my channel:

8151 minutes watched 2589 views In general, my live YouTube streams using the PlayStation 4 built-in streaming system has had the most viewers, but other videos have been reasonably popular even though they weren't streamed live. A lot of my videos of Amiga games have done reasonably well, but none better than Paradroid 90: 5104 minutes watched 1270 views

In total, my videos have had 34000 views and 1500 hours watched in total, which of course are very low numbers when divided by the 1000 videos in total.

Copyright strikes

This is an interesting situation: I got a copyright claim for the 'Haohmaru' video, starting at 1:49:06, which is the title sequence. The copyright claim is that the music is sampled from the track 'Bishamon' by Swiss rapper Milchmaa. Listening to the track, it is clearly the same music, but of course, since Samurai Shodown II is a game from 1994 and 'Bishamon' is from 2007, Milchmaa obviously sampled from the game, not the other way around. Now, I don't have monetization enabled on my channel (since my videos usually have around 20 views, that would be dumb), but I decided to press the 'File a dispute' button for the copyright claim on principle because this claim made no sense, and I explained the simple facts of the track being from 2007 and the game being from 1994 in the message accompanying the dispute. Today I got a mail from YouTube about the claim, stating: 'After reviewing your dispute, Believe Music [the copyright holder, I assume] has decided that their copyright claim is still valid.' which clearly shows that noone actually looked into anything regarding the video. Doing a YouTube search for Samurai Shodown II, several videos have the same copyright claim on it. Now, there is an 'Appeal rejected dispute' button, but I'm hesitant to press it, because of this description: 'Are you sure you want to appeal? You must provide your contact information to the claimant. Claim will be released: This lets you use the copyrighted material in your video. Video will be taken down: The claimant can ask us to remove your video from YouTube, and you’ll end up with a copyright strike.' A copyright strike is a three-strikes-and-you're-out system, and in this case, 'out' means that my account can be terminated, all uploaded videos removed, and I'm banned from creating any new channels. Not exactly an easy choice to press that button. I don't care much about that video, but it does nag me that Believe Music can potentially make illegitimate advertising money on every Samurai Shodown II video on YouTube, and all you can do is to risk getting a copyright strike for attempting removing the copyright claim on your video. The problem will remain for any future video of this game. After reading a blog post from another person who had trouble with Believe Music, I decided to contact Believe Music directly, using a form on their website. I wrote the following: I got a copyright claim for the linked video, starting at 1:49:06. The copyright claim is that the music is sampled from the track 'Bishamon' by Swiss rapper Milchmaa. Listening to the track, it is clearly the same music, but since Samurai Shodown II is a game from 1994 and 'Bishamon' is from 2007, Milchmaa obviously sampled from the game, not the other way around. I pressed the YouTube 'File a dispute' button for the copyright claim on principle because this claim made no sense, and I explained the simple facts of the track being from 2007 and the game being from 1994 in the message accompanying the dispute. Today I got a mail from YouTube about the claim, stating: 'After reviewing your dispute, Believe Music has decided that their copyright claim is still valid.' I don't know if this was some sort of an automated response, but it seems unlikely that Believe Music would own the rights for the soundtrack to the 1994 SNK game. Doing a YouTube search for Samurai Shodown II, several videos have the same copyright claim by Believe Music on it, and all of them would appear to be illegitimate. Since I can't post the form without ticking the box that I'm the copyright holder for the music, *which I'm certainly not*, I decided to still tick it to be able to contact you. I hope you guys are flexible enough to still deal with this issue, and I think you should remove the box to avoid scaring away other fair disputes from people like me. There is quite a lot of talk about Believe Music and copyright claims on reddit. It seems they are claiming a lot of music belongs to them.

OCDgamer.dk → syltefar.com

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.

• WayBack Machine: ocdgamer.dk (2011) - with review scores!

The Text Adventure Genre

When the genre of text adventures was at its peak, I was about 10 years old and not a native english speaker, and this type of game seemed completely impenetrable. Also, I was always very focused on graphics and sound, and having the choice between a text adventure and, say, Marble Madness or Hybris, the game with no graphics or music would never win. I did use to read Fighting Fantasy books, which were like text adventures, except with fixed choice instead of a text parser, and later on, I would make a short Warhammer 40K text adventure myself for the Amiga.

Hybrid text adventures had existed for a while, games such as Mindshadow, a text adventure with accompanying still images, originally written in 1984 for the Apple II by Ayman Adham, co-founder of Silicon & Synapse, programmer on Battle Chess and The Lost Vikings, and lead designer of World of Warcraft. The game was released by Activision, and the 1985 Amiga port is one of the earliest games to come out for the Amiga 1000. However, as this point, the genre was evolving into different styles of adventure games: there were the Sierra-style adventures games such as Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, which still used a text parser, but were fully graphical and animated with a controllable third person character, there were first person mouse-controlled adventure games such as Uninvited and Deja Vu, and finally the third person point 'n click adventures that ended up being very popular in the 1990's such as Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. All of these flavours of adventure games had graphics and sound, and seemed much more appealing to me at the time.

The Lurking Horror

30 years and thousands of video games later, I felt curious about text adventures. This was a very unique genre - could there possibly have been a unique experience that I had missed completely? I decided to try playing through a real text adventure by the prolific text adventure game company Infocom. The Lurking Horror from 1987 was supposedly one of the best of its kind. In the game you play as a university freshman just enrolled at a university, and everything takes place in the university location in a single night. The Lurking Horror is set in 'present day', which in this case means the 1980s, and it is very inspired by the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft.

I completed the game in 2018, and it was a pretty interesting experience. The Lurking Horror is far from perfect, and it actually had a lot of frustrating moments, many of which could be solved using modern design ideas adapted for the text adventure genre. But it did one thing right - it had one of the most intricate mechanical puzzles I have encountered in a game: The elevator puzzle. Here is a quote from my game log:

I made sure that the elevator was on the first floor, pryed open the elevator door, put the crowbar in the door to keep it open, climbed down, attached a chain I found to a rod using the padlock from the Tomb, climbed up and attached the other end of the chain to a hook on the bottom of the elevator, removed the crowbar, went up and called the elevator on a higher floor, ripping the rod out of the wall and opening a passage to the Steam Tunnels. Now this was a pretty sofisticated puzzle that made mechanical sense, and was pretty easy to figure out. Very nice.

Text Immersion

Games without graphics generate visuals in your mind as you play them, and these visuals are strong in your memory after playing the game. One of the first times I noticed this was playing Moria back in the 90s, a classic roguelike. I have a vivid memory of walking through dank tunnels with torches on the walls, hearing my footsteps echo against the stone walls. None of that is in the game, all of that is something I made up myself. The Lurking Horror had a similar effect, I can see G.U.E. Tech in my mind, the walkways, stairs, elevators, the snow storm outside, and something I haven't tried before: a clear layout of the whole place in my head, something rare for someone with no sense of direction such as myself.

Text adventures have the potential to be more immersive than most games, even games that deliberately avoid showing or hearing your own character, such as first person RPGs. In 'The Lurking Horror', I felt I completely inhabited the character, and it reminded me of playing a pen and paper RPG, without the social aspect. When a Call of Cthulhu pen and paper RPG 1990s campaign was started at the office where I work, I decided to transplant my character from 'The Lurking Horror' to this game. I took the backstory and decided that my character would be traumatized and antisocial after the events of the game, and played him like that.

Please check out my playthrough on YouTube.

Completed Tetris Effect. 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.

Tetris Aesthetics

The classic arcade puzzle Tetris and cyberpunk techno rail shooter Rez are some of my favorite games of all time. Tetris Effect has been presented as a Tetris game by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, producer of Rez, making it a strange dream come true for me.

Lumines + Child of Eden + Rez = Tetris?

The notion that this is 'a Tetris game by Tetsuya Mizuguchi' requires a little more refinement. Tetris Effect was developed by Japanese developer Resonair and directed by Takashi Ishihara. Resonair also ported Rez to modern consoles and VR under the name 'Rez Infinite', and Ishihara designed the new 'Area X' for Rez Infinte. Similarly, Lumines, a game that Mizuguchi originally directed, and a game that is very similar to Tetris Effect in almost every way, was remastered for modern consoles by Resonair. Tetris Effect was co-produced by Mizuguchi and Mark MacDonald, and like the aforementioned remastered games, published by Enhance Inc., a company Mizuguchi founded after leaving Q Entertainment, developer of Lumines. Apart from production and publishing, Mizuguchi has 'Game Concept' credits together with Ishihara. This could be interpreted as Mizuguchi being the one with the game ideas, with Resonair implementing them. Until recently he was listed as the game director on the Tetris Effect Wikipedia page, but this has been fixed.

More than anything else, Tetris Effect is a Tetris game. It's not derived from or inspiried by Tetris like Lumines was, this is a modern Tetris game with the metagame structure of Lumines, the new agy visual and musical aesthetics of Child of Eden (a game directed by Mizuguchi), and a great implementation of the musical integration ideas of Rez, which was seminal for its musical integration, but not technically well implemented (possibly due to limitations of the hardware, I'm not sure).

The game has a campaign-like mode, called JOURNEY MODE, and a list of EFFECT MODES, with different rule variations.

In JOURNEY MODE, you are playing a Tetris game accompanied by beautiful visuals and uplifting music, and every move you make is accompanied by musical sounds that are quantized to fit the rest of the music. The progression and feeling is very reminiscent of Lumines. At times, I wished for this game to be more Rez and less Child of Eden. I don't mind the new age aesthetics of this game, but I can't help dreaming of a brutal techno cyberpunk version of Tetris Effect.

The visuals are mostly very well implemented, save for a few minor frame drops (on the regular old PS4), e.g. going above water in the dolphin level. The frame drops are rare, but are frustrating in a Tetris game, where you need all the frames you can get to make split second decisions.

The audio boldly blends musical elements and sound design, with unusually tight integration between your actions as a player and the sound. When you realize just how much of the music and sound is created by you moving and dropping tetrominos, you are filled with childish joy. Both music and visuals react to level progression, which is very satisfying. The only let-down in the musical integration is that almost every level ends with the same style of build-up and break, which comes of as a bit cheesy and unimaginative.

Speed Change

The way the Tetris gameplay is integrated with the emotional experience and progression of levels in JOURNEY MODE seems to be through one parameter alone, as musical and visual climaxes are accompanied by sudden changes in game speed. These changes seem to invite using the one addition to Tetris in this mode, the ZONE mechanic, which can act as a life saving mechanic during the game speed changes.

I completed JOURNEY MODE without ever using the ZONE mechanic, because I didn't know it was there. That's what you get for skipping the tutorial. So, when I played through JOURNEY MODE, the speed changes were extremely jarring, forcing me to snap out of the typical Tetris mental flow state and go into full on panic mode, dropping tetrominos all over the place, desperately trying to survive. I believe the changes in game speed are based on lines cleared in a level, but it is not visually indicated in any obvious way, and although it is connected to musical changes, it is not at all obvious which musical changes are accompanying changes in game speed, and which are not. So, the first time you play a level, the game speed changes can come as a total surprise, creating these jarring jumps in mental states. I tended to mess up badly when this happened.

Adding salt to the wound, the music seems to take on an almost mocking tone in these situations. The soundtrack accompanies the speed changes with crescendos and triumphant vocals, and at times, this almost felt like the game was celebrating its triumph over me! For the final level in JOURNEY MODE, you have to clear 90 lines. Without the ZONE mechanic, I failed many times when the speed changed along with the music swelling to epic levels, and I got so annoyed that I ended up turning the volume down on my TV. I'm sure my frustration to a large degree was due to me not knowing about the ZONE mechanic.

Modes

After finishing JOURNEY MODE, I started playing the EFFECT MODES, which are now my preferred way of playing the game. The CLASSIC mode has the same levels and music as JOURNEY MODE, but with a slower build, and none of the abrupt game speed changes. It feels much better, and because you play the same level for a longer time than in JOURNEY MODE, you may well end up completely entranced by the aesthetics.

As great as the EFFECT MODES are, I can't help but compare this game to Puyo Puyo Tetris, a superb Tetris / Puyo Puyo hybrid game that came out in 2014. Puyo Puyo Tetris has a wealth of innovative modes, many of them fusions of Tetris and Puyo Puyo, others cool new twists on each game separately. Tetris Effect lifts its ALL CLEAR mode directly from Puyo Puyo Tetris and both games borrow ideas from the awesome Super Famicom game Tetris Battle Gaiden, but I don't think Tetris Effect contributes with a new mode that is as interesting as these games.

All nitpicking aside, Tetris Effect is a wonderful experience for anyone who likes Tetris, and the musical integration should be experienced by anyone interested in audio technology and design. And be sure to check out the tutorial before starting JOURNEY MODE, or you'll be sorry!

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.

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).

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

Completed Spelunky. 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 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.

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.

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.

Damn, I streamed Nioh for 9 hours and had 129 viewers along the way. Crazy.

Completed Demon's Souls. 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.

I played through most of a nearly finished version of THOTH with Thomas while visiting him in Aarhus. Very fun, and very exhausting. :)

Completed R-Type III: The Third Lightning. 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.

I entered a prerelease code and now I can play the thing I spent the last 5 years working on on my very own Xbox One.

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.

Completed Shadow of the Beast. YEEEEAAAHHH!!!!

I spent all day today beating these guys. This was an extremely hard boss fight.

YEEEEESSS!!! Gehrman is defeated, the Moon Presence wasn't much of a challenge, and now ... Platinum trophy *and* all DLC trophies!

Mastered Bloodborne.

This was my first live stream to YouTube.

Completed Dark Souls. It took me 4 years get to a point where I enjoyed Dark Souls, and then two weeks to complete the rest of the game.

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.

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:

1. Your health doesn't decrease when you die. Much less stressful.
2. Monsters won't stop respawning, which means you are able to grind character levels, which seems important to adjust the game's difficulty.
3. No inventory encumbrance.
4. 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.

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. :)

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.

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.

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'.

Damn, this game is 8K. Amazing.

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.

OK, the game should be out today 2.5 hours from now, I have to complete all levels before other people! :)

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.

Completed Castlevania. 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

Solution: outer RT x 2, middle RT, inner RT x 2

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.

Reached level 8/8 using 7 lives cheat, but died. The first game I played on my BRAND NEW SEGA GENESIS!!!

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...

Completed Tekken 2. 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.

Completed Mega Man. 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.

Played the early parts of Demon's Souls with Jauert, and we really didn't like it. The souls series really made a horrible first impression.

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.

I was trying this out at Jeppe's place, and tested the ability of the game to upload a clip to YouTube - my first upload to my YouTube channel.

My first 3 Achievements are from September 5th, solving world 2 and traversing world 2 and 3. What a great game.

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.

I just realized something: This game really shouldn't be played at night. It's just too much. It's all well and good, when I can look around and the sun is out, people walking around outside the window, my darker instincts kept at bay by rationality. But when its dark, I cannot bear it. So this tip is for you who are like me, and roleplay this game all the way through: play it during the evenings - never play it at night. Better for your health that way. Yesterday night I played the return to the water tower level, and I had to take desperate measures to keep playing; I turned the TV way down, and started some random episodes of The Simpsons on my laptop on the coffee table. Combined with my usual tactics of turning my head away from the TV each time I wake up in the game, expecting the worst. As Yngve prepared me for, Room 302, which in the beginning is your sanctuary from the horrors of the dreamworlds, gradually becomes the place you fear the most. The dreamworlds have their own reasonable gamelogic, each level has its own Victim, and I've seen every level once before. But in the Room 302, anything goes. I've seen ghostly funghi crawl slowly across my walls, blood running from my faucet, not the mention the worst of them (like the Wailling Wall of Terror). During the evening, my mind is prepared. Every time I open the bedroom door, I expect something standing in the hallway, screaming at me. I creep into the living room like a ninja, fearing to tread each step. So when I looked out the peephole and saw my own corpse staring back at me from outside, I was ready for it. I almost laughed, content that the game is not going to kill me before I finish it. During the evening, it's not so bad. But the time is 21:04, and the shadows are growing longer. I think it's time to switch to R-Type... Oh, and by the way, even though I fear Room 302 more than the other levels, something gnaws at my gut right now. Eileen looks stranger every time I look at her, with brown, pulsating blemishes all over her bruised body. And she talks errantly, telling her mother to wake up. Naturally, I fear the worst...

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...

I've returned to this horror masterpiece, and the game just keeps impressing me... The plot is mysterious, I'm keeping notes in a Memento-like manner, the graphics is wonderfully detailed, even at locations you don't visit more than once. For instance, in the apartment world, It seems as though every single apartment have received special attention and a unique design: strange colours on the walls, unique lighting due to scattered furniture. The colour of the city sky subtly changes with time, and the way that the waking world and the other worlds interact is puzzling and wonderful. But first and foremost - the atmosphere is convincingly dark, paranoid, and, at times, pure horror that makes you want to pause the game and turn on all the lights. In total, I'm loving it!

Completed R-Type Tactics. So, what have I done since the 20th of September? Not much besides playing R-Type Tactics. I just completed the Earth campaign, 30 missions.
I will not hesitate to say that R-Type Tactics has been the best ever tactics game experience for me. So, what's to say about R-Type Tactics? Well first and foremost, read my Wikipedia article about the game. Of course, when you read this, it may not be mine anymore :).
Playing this game was a wonderful experience, even though it posed an initial problems: as of yet, it has only been released in Japan. Well, it didn't stop me, and much trial and error led my to deduce most of the japanese menus. Luckily, all the missions in the game can be completed by totally annihilating the opponent. That was what I did, and it worked :). Now I have two sheets of notes filled with characters that may look japanese, but which might very well be totally illegible by any person from japan.
So, what kind of game is this? I really liked Battle Isle back in the day, and I do prefer hexagonal to rectangular grids. R-Type Tactics is similar to Battle Isle in certain respects, but it is also an R-Type game, which makes it quite different in other respects.
The graphics is really the best of its kind. The 2D view is very clear and nicely drawn, and has 3D backdrops of floating objects in space, creating a nice ambient atmosphere. Whenever units battle each other, beautiful 3D animations are shown. The animations are a bit more abstract than you are used to in this genre. Slow-moving and brightly coloured laser beams move in intricate geometric patterns, and lends the game a more artistic feel that is usual for the tactics genre. The models and lighting are nothing short of perfect. By the way, R-Type Final for the PS2 has similar graphic qualities, and it is also highly recommended.
The gameplay of R-Type Tactics has a great flow. The rules are what has come to be expected from a modern tactics game, and the balance is great, even though the Earth campaign might be a bit too easy for the hardcore tactics gamer. Then again, the high number of levels in the game (60 in all, I suspect), and the fact that it takes several hours to complete some of the larger levels, even with 3D animation disabled and fast movement speed, completing the game is quite a task. The side-scrolling view together with the strong adherence to the rules of the strange R-Type universe, makes the game quite unique. The side-scrolling view can also be annoying in 3 or so levels, when you have to travel backwards, and your ships cannot turn around to make their wave cannons come into play. The game would be better without these levels, but they do not deduct anything from the overall experience.
Even though many of the R-Type fighters are similar, the overall abilities of the units are varied enough to enable very different styles of play. The basic strategy of any tactics game is to keep clear of the enemy's firing range and always attack first. This is even more important in R-Type Tactics, as you R-Type units lose their wave cannon charges if they are hit. One of my favourite tactics uses the UHFC-007 (carrier) in conjunction with 3 R-Type attack craft and their Forces. When the wave cannons of all the R-Type units are fully charged, the R-Types are loaded into the UHFC-007. The UHFC-007 moves fast and can take a lot of punishment. When enemies are close, the R-Types are launched and fire their wave cannons. If the Rwf-13A/B are used, they may even return to the carrier in the same turn if there is additional danger. The Rwf-13A/B are really the stars of the show, as their speed and ability to move after firing makes them absolutely essential. In my opinion, the Rwf-9D(H) has the best wave cannon, as it fires straight forward which is easier to control than some of the more esoteric wave cannons, and it has a range of 6 grid cells. Also, for scouting, the Rwf-9Ac is unsurpassed with its great range and ability to hide in subspace. You can actually hide it inside a rock and stay there without using fuel and spy on the enemy. If the enemy does come too close, the movement of the enemy will be interrupted. Very nice.
The Earth campaign was easy enough to complete; only a single level of the 30 was not completed in the first attempt, and it was one of the stupid underwater levels, where my units moved way too slow.
I have now unlocked the ability to play a campaign as the evil aliens, the Bydo.

Oh man! This is my kind of game. I started playing for real yesterday, and I was scared beyond my wits. I had to stop playing when I got tired, because I just couldn't survive another shock. When tonight I encountered a certain remote location in the Forest World, a single bone-chilling howl sent me running back to the portal to The Room to save. I investigated the entire rest of the world before entering that horrible place. This game has a quality that is very rare and appreciated more by me than by most people. The world is small, but incredibly detailed and rewards my slow and investigative style of playing. The best example is the view outside the window. I've literally spent minutes at a time gazing out the window, learning every detail of the neighbourhood by heart. When the pink bunny balloon suddenly appeared in the sky, I was in a state of shock.

Completed Ninja Gaiden. rank: Head Ninja, kills: 2203, time: 15:09:59, Karma: 7171135, Praise: 3532

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.

Almost broke the return key on my borrowed Acorn Electron on this awesome Defender clone.

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.