It's the Off-Topic Internet Sightseeing Tour!

[Nester the Lark]

So, one of my favorite Twitch streamers I like to watch is LordBBH (YouTube channel). He's basically an expert on arcade games, and has gotten 1CCs in almost 600 different games on stream (if he hasn't already passed that).

Anyway, he recently started a new series called "Push to Reject" in which he highlights obscure, less talked about arcade games, discussing them and showing some gameplay. As part of the series, he's covered a few early Nintendo arcade games, including Sheriff, Helifire, and of course, Radar Scope. I thought it was interesting, so I wanted to share them.

(Mild language warning.)

[Nester the Lark]

Here's a speedrun of Gyromite on NES, but the runner is a dog.



Also, this run has been accepted for Awesome Games Done Quick 2024.

[Evie ❤✿]

There is a Nazo no Murasame Jō (The Mysterious Murasame Castle) live action TV drama by Fuji Television, which was part of the Monday night drama series Getsuyou (Monday) Drama Land in 1986. It was released on DVD in box-set #2 of Onyanko Club in Getsuyou Drama Land (おニャン子クラブin月曜ドラマランド). Apparently nobody had preserved it online, until now.

[Nester the Lark]

Someone recreated a Godzilla movie in Tears of the Kingdom:

[Nester the Lark]

Concept sketches of "Wapeach" have been posted online by her creator, Fumihide Aoki (who also created Waluigi). You can find them on his Instagram, as well as this article on Nintendo Everything.

Wapeach was created for the game Mario Tennis, but ultimately rejected.

It's interesting to finally see what she would've looked like, but personally, I don't think there need to be "wa" versions of every Mario character.

[nocturnal YL]

Ars Technica did a Tetris Q&A with Alexey Pajitnov and Henk Rogers.

Henk Rogers' defence of the modern rotation system boils down to "yeah I know players hate me, but having consistency is better than not".

[Nester the Lark]

I personally prefer the modern rotation system, as well as the bag system, the hold ability, and being able to see ahead multiple pieces. I feel like the various adjustments made to the game over the years have improved it. Maybe I'm just used to the modern rule set, but when I tried going back to Game Boy Tetris when it was added to NSO, I almost found it unplayable.

[nocturnal YL]

I like modern Tetris too. My biggest concern with the guideline is that Tetris doesn't seem to be evolving further from what's being set now. Spin moves other than T is an example; those are just as difficult to set up, but most games don't specifically recognise them.

Game Boy Tetris feels like a completely different game. I'm reminded of a ROM hack that gives Game Boy Tetris modern features.

[Evie ❤✿]

I love Tetris too! (But only relatively recently tried to play it more strategically) ^^ I also prefer modern Tetris. I'm not very good at Tetris on platforms such as the Game Boy or NES (often not getting very far), but for games with the modern rotation system, bag system, hold feature, the ability to see ahead I find it much easier to build into my intuition.

Another important feature which wasn't mentioned is hard dropping. This is very important. When you practise enough you're not afraid of doing it anymore and it saves a lot of time (so you can focus more on flipping/moving less for efficient flat, simple placements w/o gaps, and speed - when you've decided, just hard drop). My average on Tetris 99 is now fluctuates between about 20~30 (a few times I've got top 10 but I'm not good enough to win, and some competitive Tetris 99 players may talk about your first win as if it's nothing - at the end of the day it's most important to just have fun), or like just 50, and like 70 for bad luck for those games where you get a huge amount of garbage at the beginning. I want to bring that 'good average' closer to 10 eventually though. As for spin moves, I'm not very good; nor do I have a fancy stacking strategy.

Also this new meme about old Tetris. x3 Like.. old Tetris is an entirely different game to me; and quite like what Rey said I probably can't even make it to that below screen. I'm amazed at how the new person who beat Tetris could play so long (and when reading about the RAM execution mechanics; how people will have to be mindful of that if they are doing 'get the latest possible freeze' rather than 'any% freeze speedrun' so to speak.

In fact, it introduces new (unintended) rules into the game, for example if I remember you at one point have to avoid getting Tetrises to get a chance for avoiding a freeze to get one of the later ones, or one of the colour schemes is really hard to see, or it may start to report to you the wrong progress (making you think more to see if you've met the criteria to avoid the next freeze). But now that I've found the link again, here are those specifics without me relying on what I remembered about it:

(Specifically, the Crash Theory spreadsheet by Hydrant explain these things in detail; see also the Crash Dodge tab)

And this video by aGameScout summarises things well:



It would be cool if Tetris evolves in a surprising new way (without giving people the sense that it's not Tetris anymore even though some people dislike modern rotation system already).

(Still in jolly mood. Evie calm down, lol.)

[Nester the Lark]

Nintendo can't have approved of this.

EDIT: Yeah, Nintendo had no part in this.

[Nester the Lark]

Here's that speedrun of Gyromite by Peanut Butter the dog during Awesome Games Done Quick.

[Evie ❤✿]

"Turns out, the GBA crash sound is just the console playing its entire address space as sound data. If we have a clear recording, we can convert it back to actual bytes, thus dumping the RAM and ROM."

[Nester the Lark]

The Legend of Zelda orchestra concert that was originally scheduled to be part of Nintendo Live 2024 Tokyo will now be streamed (pre-recorded) on YouTube on February 9.

[Nester the Lark]

The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences announced that Koji Kondo will be inducted into the Hall of Fame at this year's D.I.C.E. Awards. IGN will live stream the event happening on February 15 at 8pm PST. (Source: GoNintendo)

[Nester the Lark]

Here is the Legend of Zelda concert that was originally supposed to be part of Nintendo Live 2024.



Additionally, here's a close look at the Tears of the Kingdom statues that were intended to be at the show.