Foothills Of Passage

Super Mario Land 2 – Memory Exploration

Retro Game Mechanics Explained is an educational video series from Super Mario World speedrunner Dotsarecool. In Super Mario Land 2, it’s possible to glitch yourself right out of the map and into other regions of the Game Boy’s address space. Wandering around those garbage tiles and randomly flipping bits will usually crash the game, but it’s possible to trigger the ending credits from there. This reminds me of the game-breaking screen warp glitch I played around with in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening v1.0.

Source: Retro Game Mechanics Explained via YouTube recommendation

TerminalMontage – Something About Super Mario 64

Super Mario 64 is fun to speedrun and fun to break. YouTube animator TerminalMontage captures this pretty accurately in this animated 0-star speedrun. I’m heading to GDEX to play some local indie games and break them, of course. EDIT: GDEX got too serious and too expensive, so I actually didn't go.

Source: Something About Super Mario 64 ANIMATED SPEEDRUN (Loud Sound Warning) ⭐️ 0 Stars 01:49 Legit Non-TAS via Jiko

Chopin’s Twist Guide

Most Tetris games made since 2001 let you twist blocks into gaps that seem impossible. Some of these setups can be used to help correct mistakes, and others are just for fun. Even if you only learn the T-Spins, you’ll be able to send garbage faster than just back-to-back Tetrises all day. If you want to play around with twists, try King of Stackers, a turn-based Tetris battle sim where you can use every trick in the book to make the most of your seven pieces per turn.

Source: Chopin's Twist Guide – YouTube

Casey Neistat – Human Flying Drone

I finally dig my way out of backlogs and fake news and find a ten foot monster drone carrying a snowboarding filmmaker. Doesn’t that make it a helicopter instead? Casey Neistat, best known for crashing his bike, puts his life in the hands of the world’s largest homemade drone as it tows him all over Finland. There’s a making-of video too.

Source: Casey Neistat via TwistedSifter

Retro Gaming in Columbus

Columbus Underground interviewed Chris Bidwell about what’s cool about retro gaming, his invite-only tournament, the Hexadecathlon, and its expansion into a public tournament series, the Columbus Retro League. Retro games bring out a completely different crowd from the modern fighting game events, and it’s been great to get to know them. They know how to get hype, too! Come on out to Video Hockey Day in Columbus on Sunday!

This room is full of beastly players. In this picture, I'm playing Marble Madness on the NES and having the run of my life, 95610 points. It only got me third place in that game. The only high score contest I actually won was Star Fox Super Weekend. It's Star Fox with a Star Soldier-style five minute score attack mode with huge bonuses for shooting down all the enemies in a stage.

Source: http://www.columbusunderground.com/retro-gamers-celebrate-bygone-era-of-video-game-classics via JD Lowe and Columbus Underground’s RSS feed, photos via Chris Bidwell and my phone camera

Poleovermania Mario 3 Collections

Super Mario Bros. 3 has been out for 25 years and we still keep finding new ways to break it. Poleovermania puts on a master class in tool-assisted Mario 3 trickery and shows off dozens of the game’s lesser-known bugs. When I play the game, I can only do some of these tricks, usually by accident.

Source: マリオ3小ネタ集 – YouTube (Mario 3 Clip Collection), マリオ3小ネタ集2 – YouTube (Mario 3 Clip Collection 2), and マリオ3無限1UP集 – YouTube (Mario 3 Infinite 1UP Collection) via the name of a song by desk that he wrote for a Marvel vs. Capcom 3 bug video

Fire Your Representatives!

Serious time here for a minute. If you can legally vote in the US, it’s your responsibility to read about your ballot and vote in the mid-term elections on Tuesday, or you have no right to complain about the outcome.

Who is your House Representative? Did they participate in the budget stalemate that shut down the government for 16 days? Did they vote for CISPA, a cybersecurity bill that would have allowed the NSA to bypass existing privacy laws? If so, vote against them and fire them. This includes every Representative from Ohio except Tim Ryan.

UPDATE: Every House incumbent in Ohio got re-elected. It’s like the whole state rose up in unison and said “Government shutdowns? CISPA? Sounds good; do more of that.” Way to fail, Ohio.

The blog will return to its regular goofiness next week.

Source: My Ballot — Columbus Dispatch Voters Guide, Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, and a lot of searching; EFF helped; image from Wikipedia

sh/f Super Fireball Battle

Now that I’ve got all my WordPress posts on Tumblr, what should I do with it? How about I introduce a tool-assisted video Sonic Hurricane debuted at Evo2k10? Evenly matched projectiles and beams clash like it’s Dragon Ball Z. This video got me into Shinichi Osawa’s album The One and the soundtrack to DoDonPachi Resurrection Black Label.

Source: Sonic Hurricane via RSS feed nearly eight years ago

AndyTHPS's Shipyard Style Line

In 2003, I had just started making levels for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 when the legendary AndyTHPS unleashed this Shipyard line on the Internet. This changed my life. It didn’t only motivate me to buy a capture device and start recording my own videos. This video also introduced me to Dillinger Escape Plan and started my descent into math-metal insanity. I was hooked for years.

Source: AndyTHPS via the tXo‘s old web site

PiNe – Trick or Treat!

I haven’t done one of these artist posts in over a year. Let’s fix that with PiNe. PiNe delivers vivid scenes and cool character designs in a handy RSS feed.

When I saw this on today's Pixivision Halloween post, I knew today I'd have to post this too. Google Translate translates the Japanese title to "I do not have to make sweets!"

Source: PiNe – Trick or Treat! via Pixiv

“Trick or Treat!”

Happy Halloween ☾