Mailbag 6 - Backtracking

Apparently after Cohost fell, I forgot to make a mailbag of the last several months of questions I received. In fact, after reviewing my Cohost data-dump, it turns out that I even missed a couple questions from earlier only because they were not properly tagged. We regret this particular error, and promise to never do it again.

Note that I have made the executive decision to replace all instances of the :eggbug: emote with Smiling face. I have also replaced any ask-begging links with a link to the current forum thread for doing so. Please understand.

anonymous asked (Feb 2024):

do you believe god exists within video games or are they, like everything, made of sin

According to Johannine theology, the Word which created all things is the Light of the World, yet the world doth not comprehend/perceive it (John 1:5). John also says that this light is Shining in the Darkness, which happens to be the title of Camelot Software Planning's hit 1991 dungeon crawler for the Sega Genesis. Therefore, we can conclude that God is in at least one videographic game.

Moreover, speaking of the Word, how hubristic would it be of us to claim that videogames lie in sin, while yet we humans are a continual fountain of sin! Verily, when God sendeth his Word unto us we set it aside and hearken not unto it. And yet a videogame, which is made of naught but the dust of the earth, doth dutifully execute every word of machine language that doth enliven its being. Wherefore, shall not their sins fall upon the heads of us, their makers, whilst they be filled with the grace of our God?

Alternatively, if you're talking about the character of God who has appeared in countless JRPGs, I think there's something to be said about how he keeps making new appearances despite how many times he's been killed. Perhaps "God" in this case is a gestalt that naturally emerges from the logical results of electro-ludic processes

Thank you for the ask. Please ask again. Smiling face #SuperMarioTheodicy

This next ask is from an old friend I hadn't talked with in a decade, which made me feel vindicated for allowing anonymous asks from non-users.

"little j" asked (May 2024):

Yo, RT! Don't know if you remember me, but this is Ferret Warlord from the TASVideos community (although these days I try to go by "little j"). I recently developed a ZZT itch that needed to be scratched, which led me to stumbling on your stuff. I know you are one of us, but I still did not expect a ZZT game to speak my language, as it were, the way Samantha Arantes is Spiritually Drained by the Gig Economy's ending sequence did! Hooray for catgirl missionaries, I suppose.

Anyway, this is an "ask" form, so I suppose I should pose a question. I see you are involved in Metroid 2 hackery. As the creator of the original "select glitch" TAS, I must ask, has anyone dug into and figured out why the select glitch works in the first place?

Oh hey. I remember you! Frankly, I'm more surprised that you remember me at all (considering that I feel like I was just an annoying kid who did nothing back when I was active on TASVideos (though I guess I did make one TAS and cheerled several other TASes back then)). Either way, I'm glad to see you're still alive and well. (For those of you in the audience who don't know this guy, check out this incredible Metroid II TAS that he was talking about.)

Now, to answer your question about the select glitch: it's the result of like 4 different under-the-hood design decisions the devs made. Thanks to the fact that we now have a full disassembly of the game, we can just look at the offending code and see how things fall into place:

  1. When the game prepares a scrolling update for the background tilemap, it's first criteria it checks for which direction to update is the frame counter, which is why you need to press select on magic frames to get it to work (as I'm sure you figured out making your TAS). These prepared BG updates are not processed until VBlank.

  2. Rather than having separate spritemaps for Samus depending on if missiles are toggled (or having the arm cannon be a separate sprite entity) the game instead loads and unloads their graphics immediately by invoking a generic VRAM transfer. These generic VRAM transfers are also done during VBlank.

  3. The game's VBlank handler has several branches that are mutually exclusive, and "generic VRAM transfer" branch has priority over the "update the BG tilemap" branch. This was obviously done to meet the timing constraints for VBlank, but since VRAM map updates are not deferred to the next frame if they are missed, this means those updated may get dropped.

  4. Collision detection with the background (for both Samus and enemies) is done by reading VRAM during HBlank, so what you see is literally what you get, collision-wise. (This is so performant :-) :-) :-) )

If any one of these things were handled differently, the glitch would not occur or would have purely been a visual artifact.

As for ZZT, I'm sure you already know, but there's a lot more to the modern ZZT community than my silly games. We have a very nice museum with a nice and active Discord. People like you with random nostalgia kicks pop up all the time, and are always welcome. (Be aware that we have a wonderful witch/archivist who will shake you down to find any unpreserved worlds when you arrive.) I myself didn't join the community until 2020, despite being a lifelong fan/lurker, but I feel like I fit right in.

Speaking of joining, we're planning on holding a short 2.4 hour ZZT jam sometime within the next couple of weekends, and imho it would be the perfect time for someone like you to jump on in and participate.

As for my latest game, I'm glad you enjoyed it. :) It still makes me feel weird (in a good way) whenever someone says they liked it, considering that I didn't quite expect that turning the metaphorical dials of self-indulgence, cringeworthiness, idiosyncrasy, and inscrutability up to 11 would have been a winning formula. But so far the response to it has been universally positive.

Thanks for the ask. Smiling face

These two asks come from a day when our building lost power at work (we are very dependent on electricity there):

anonymous asked (June 2024):

Was it you who cut the power?

I can't speak for the trees, but I think it was the trees. I saw three freshly downed trees this morning and (while I don't want to typecast) it seems like the most reasonable explanation. #TheLorax

(Shortly after this post, power was restored to the building, I made a post indicating such, and then got another ask.)

Cania inquired (June 2024):

did any mysterious murders happen while the lights were briefly out?

We finally put the Trix rabbit out of his misery.

No, we do not apologize.

elegy-n questioned (June 2024):

What's the worst piece of media you think more people should still experience in its completion.

my wife's immediate response to this question was "i dunno zelda cdi?"

my very silly first thought was "any given @Kawaiikochans comic" (bless them)

i'm trying to think of a more serious answer here, but the thought that keeps coming to mind is "give yourslef some self respect and Just Walk Out. don't torture yourself." I do not think people's lives are generally improved by exposure to Actually Bad media (e.g. I never needed to see the Rise of Skywalker (1/4 stars))

it's tempting to list something that is campy, but campiness is good

really, the problem with this question is finding something that straddles the lines of low quality and profundity just right, because i tend to think of anything in that general area is also Quite Good, Actually.

however, if focus my lens on some more obscure stuff, and allow myself the option to pick something that is Holistically Good, even if technically flawed, some clearer choices start to appear.

...I'm going to have to say the 2014 ZZT game Growing Up. it's a little game about trying to get out of the house to go on a walk.

In terms of production, this is an amateurish piece of outsider art that would have been rejected/mocked by the early-00s ZZT community for its rough artwork and programming errors. However, on an emotional level it's more raw than anything the stuffy craft-sharpeners in the community made in the two decades prior or have made in the decade since.

Highly recommended (tho major CW for its depiction of domestic and early adolescent hell)

jaymcgavren asked (June 2024):

Hey! I'm the author (many many (many) years ago) of Metroid X. I was doing one of my occasional narcissistic searches for people talking about the hack, and your map came up.

I'm beyond flattered; you put quite a bit of work into it, and it's gorgeous! Heck, there's a lot I don't remember about the edit so it's a useful reference even for me. I'm totally saving a copy (if that's okay).

I really appreciate when anyone spreads the word about Metroid X, and this is doing so in the best possible way! Thank you!

I'm glad you liked the map! Of course you can keep a copy of it. I'm kinda bad at attaching a proper license to any of my creative stuff, but you can do anything with it as long as the attribution remains in place. (The map in question, for you folks at home.)

As a bonus, you can also have a couple other charts and graphs I cooked up for a Let's Play I did a few years back, (before I made the snazzy map in question). I thought progression structure --- with the major items following a set sequence but the minibosses being available as soon as the player is ready --- was a really clever twist on the Metroid formula.

Anyhow, back in 2020 I made the foolhardy decision to try playing through every Metroid 1 hack out there. I made it about 75% of the way there before petering out (my percentage has remained roughly the same since then, even with the new releases). Thanks to that experience, I can confidently say that of all the hacks released during the MetEdit era (circa 1999-2010), barely anything else comes close in terms of awareness of limitations, design sense, or aesthetic sense. It was a very auspicious start for the Metroid hacking scene!

Recently, I've run into some hackers who've expressed interest in remaking your mod in another game (Metroid Zero Mission, IIRC), out of respect for the OG Metroid mod. I don't think they've started actually making it yet, but if they got your (un)official blessing that'd be really cool.

Thanks for the kind words! #MarkBrownianDependencyCharts

xkeeper asked (July 2024):

you like talking about metroid, huh? what's some fun stuff about it

Screenshot of Vitality deconstructed into its component layers

  • Vitality is a fun-looking romhack. For many, many rooms in the hack, the difference between what the two layers look like in the editor versus what they look like after being color-blended in-game is astounding. (Every Metroid hacker is openly jealous of how this looks.)

  • Metroid 2 has some unused sprites that I still need to add to its TCRF article. There are 18 unreferenced enemy spritemaps that do not correlate with any extant enemy graphics page. Once I decide how best to represent them (or rather: when the motivation strikes again), I'll add them to the page.

  • The earliest recorded Super Metroid speedruns were done in ZSNES. Given the atrocious stability of ZSNES, I recall (this was like 20 years ago) one of the runs desyncing during the final escape, meaning that we had to complete the run manually to see the final time.

  • The series is named after American author F. Scott Fitzgerald's firstborn child, Seamus Metroid Fitzgerald.

  • The eye doors in Super Metroid are technically not enemies, but rather tilemap-based actors ("PLMs" as the community calls them), meaning they belong to the same class as items, missile doors, scroll triggers, save stations, and mid-animation breakable blocks.

(one of these things is a lie)

thank you for the ask Smiling face

also who told you metroid was fun???

TailsMilePrower asked (Sept 2024):

Wow! Interesting account I really just followed you- may I ask what’s your favorite game/g.c)? !

oh hey! it's that fella from sonic! not sure why you'd follow me but i'm flattered nonetheless.

My favorite game? Well, if you've followed me or looked at my posts for any appreciable amount of time, you'll suspect it's a Metroid. That might be correct. Metroids 2 and 3, followed by Prime and 5, are the most interesting to me.

If you want a more thorough understanding of gaming tastes, I made one of those Game Grids several months ago. Check it out!

As for the second half of your question, I'm not sure what you mean by "g.c", so I'll just make several educated guesses:

  • Game Creator (software) - ZZT for DOS. This is very much a nostalgia and "I already know how to use this tool too well"-brainrot kind of choice, but I like how without too much effort I can produce a reasonable facsimile of a visual novel or an old-school top-down puzzler/action-adventure thing, and also not worry about composing any music (not a talent of mine).
  • Game Creator (person) - Any of my wonderful friends who make smalltime games and mods. Smiling face
  • Game Character - Did you know you can make an original character and put them in a videogame so they can be someone's favorite videogame character (for real, and not even by technicality!)? You did? Well, uh, ignoring that option, I'd say Wario. I love his disgusting chaos gremlin energy.
  • Grape Cluster - Whatever grapes I happen to be eating now. I'm not picky.
  • Grimp Collection - My grimp collection can be found here.
  • Gravel Clump - I have no gravel-related preferences.

Hope this helps!

anonymous asked (Sept 2024):

What's your deal with Speedy Eggbert??

echolalia

I've never played the games. I just saw the name in a VGMaps.com update back in like 2009 or whatever and its been stuck in my head ever since. It's my "cellar door."

I even got my wife saying it sometimes.

This is the last Ask I ever received on Cohost (basically the day before the site closed), and it was from a minor gaming celebrity!

Jim Stormdancer asked (October 2024):

Whenever I talk to people about the Cohost Diaspora I've been saying things like "for me it was just another place to post but a lot of the people I've enjoyed interacting with, this seems to have been their first and last social media service and I'll probably never hear from them again." Do you want to guest on Topic Lords?

The brain's is kinda zooming trying to figure out how to install this forum software right now, but, uh, sure!

And, yeah, Cohost is the only social media where I've bothered putting forth a Public Presence (as opposed to going friend-mode or lurk-mode). I might make a Mastodon account someday just to keep bases covered, but I will always and forever be a true forumite.

(After this we exchanged contact info in the comments, and then about 3 months later I appeared on an episode of the podcast Topic Lords.)

And that should cover all the capital-A Asks I ever received on Cohost. If I ever get any more, I'll be sure to post them here! Smiling face