Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
I'd say we're probably outdated. I don't read Wired, but I doubt they care much about retrogaming, which is what we've been primarily about until recently.
Btw, I have always wondered why some people bother with the Mirror's Edge exploit that unlocks the third-person view. Playing from that point of view just sucks big time. The immersion is completely gone, and overall the game looks a hundred times more boring. So what's the point?
In a re-release of the game, Nintendo turned the Minus World into a reward. In place of the repeating, boring water level were three new ones that the player could actually finish, and when they completed them they unlocked a “stage select” feature that let them jump anywhere in the game.
I always thought that the different FDS "minus world" was a result of the code being in a different format (or some such other technical mumbo jumbo). Was it really intentional as the article suggests?
In a re-release of the game, Nintendo turned the Minus World into a reward. In place of the repeating, boring water level were three new ones that the player could actually finish, and when they completed them they unlocked a “stage select” feature that let them jump anywhere in the game.
I always thought that the different FDS "minus world" was a result of the code being in a different format (or some such other technical mumbo jumbo). Was it really intentional as the article suggests?
According to Wikipedia, SMB1 was released in Japan in 1985 for FDS, and North America in 1986 for NES. The youtube video he links to specifically states that it is the FDS version of the game, and according to themushroomkingdom.com, the effect he describes (level select) has always occurred in the FDS version.
Thus, unless the programmers at Nintendo are time-traveling telekinetic fish-men with the ability to summon the God Poseidon at will, I'd say that this man doesn't have a clue in Hades what he is talking about.
He most likely realized he had an article to post, after a long night of drinking and picking fights with inanimate objects, while claiming they made off-color remarks about his mother.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
Wasn't the game released for the plain old Famicom before it was released on the Famicom Disk System though? (Not that it means the glitch levels were intentional; I'm just curious.)
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
In a re-release of the game, Nintendo turned the Minus World into a reward. In place of the repeating, boring water level were three new ones that the player could actually finish, and when they completed them they unlocked a “stage select” feature that let them jump anywhere in the game.
I always thought that the different FDS "minus world" was a result of the code being in a different format (or some such other technical mumbo jumbo). Was it really intentional as the article suggests?
According to Wikipedia, SMB1 was released in Japan in 1985 for FDS, and North America in 1986 for NES. The youtube video he links to specifically states that it is the FDS version of the game, and according to themushroomkingdom.com, the effect he describes (level select) has always occurred in the FDS version.
That's kind of funny, because the Famicom Disk System was released in Feburary of 1986.
The NES version of Super Mario Bros. was released in 1985.
You can put two and two together from here, I imagine.
I think the writer makes a very valid point, though he has a very tiny reference pool. Also included should be every major "sequence breaking" community, Metroid especially.
Though it raises some interesting questions about the theory of game design. Do players have fun because they are defying the will of the designers? It appears so. My favorite example is Metroid Zero Mission. Great game, great redesign of the old and outdated Metroid 1. But, in a kind and noble nod to the fans that made Metroid and Super Metroid as great classics as they are, the designers of Zero Mission included many sequence breaks on purpose, most of which were masterfully implemented and added layers upon layers of depth and replay value to the game.
...However, simply because the sequence breaks were intentionally placed in the game, that somehow sucked all the fun out of it, so the game was mostly hated by the Metroid fandom. Shame.
I suspect that the MZM planners just weren't quite subtle enough. Super Metroid has a clearly defined "intended" route, but all of the deviations from that route might have been planned for...then again, they might not have!
You have to be pretty damned clever to make it up the Red Brinstar shaft without the ice beam, for example...but it's eminently doable in realtime if you're skilled enough. Or getting the super missiles without fighting Spore Spawn by using the mockball -- what is, to all intents and purposes, a glitch. Except it might not be a glitch; it certainly behaves very cleanly with the game environment unlike most glitches you find in other games.
The fact that it's so hard to figure out what the designers did and didn't plan for is part of what makes it fun to break Super Metroid. Obviously they had to do some planning as soon as they added the walljump and decided to keep infinite bomb jumps in, but then they added in roadblocks that should prevent even those abilities from letting you get by, but then you find a way around them...
In contrast, Metroid Zero Mission mostly just puts in some hidden passages and calls it a day. You need skill to play the game with fewer powerups than you're "supposed" to have, yes, but not a lot of cleverness; just knowledge of which walls are real.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
The fact that it's so hard to figure out what the designers did and didn't plan for is part of what makes it fun to break Super Metroid.
Exactly my point. Without the subtlety, the fun which comes from circumventing the creator's will is not there. When you get to the end of MZM with 14% items, and you see your special ending, you feel gypped, because you know it was planned all along, and somehow that's not as fun. You feel less like a clever maverick and more like a tool who has wasted time not doing something truly profound and new.
Personally, I'm just downright glad they acknowledged the misaimed fandom and nodded to them, whether or not they completely recreated what made SM so fun. We've all seen what happens when they take ALL the nonlinearity out of Metroid (Fusion and Prime 3), so in that sense, they gave the fans exactly what they wanted. You shouldn't hate them for that, like so many have. Besides, they couldn't have made it too much like SM, otherwise it would have been just another version of SM. Go play SM instead. They gave it its own unique and good personality as a game.
Besides, while I've never broken SM myself, I found it involved plenty of cleverness trying to beat all of MZM's self-imposed challenges, as the whole path through the game completely changed depending on what you were aiming for, and it wasn't always totally obvious what you had to do.
