Stumbling through Little Nemo

[davidn]

I cannot believe that the demographics of videos uploaded on Youtube are so heavily weighted that putting the innocent word "through" in a video title immediately throws up the tag suggestions "fire" and "flames".

Anyway. I tried another NES game, this time with an elaborate recording setup that I was playing about with all day that allows me to record my voice through the headset connected to the computer, while simultaneously running the game's audio to the guitar processor thing I use and recording it on that, then editing the two together at the end. So you can now hear both Little Nemo: The Dream Master and my reactions to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQItDEQn69Y

I'd never so much as seen the game before I started recording this video, but as it turns out, it's a game in which you hop around a dream world lulling monsters to sleep by throwing boiled sweets at them and then hijacking their bodies to get yourself around the level. It also turns out I'm dreadful at it, even though I was very proud of myself for getting to the second level.

The method I used for recording worked out rather well, but I'm confused by how out-of-sync the sound gets in Camstudio - it seems to play my voice and the video at normal speed, and yet the voice always drifts slightly ahead or behind the video over time. The process of resynchronizing them in iMovie just got more and more difficult as it went on, having to re-import the same file multiple times to split it up, having the Trim menu disappear entirely and with it preventing me from scrolling down to the last row of thumbnails on the video to edit the end - it came to be so excruciating that I found myself wondering insane things like whether Windows Movie Maker might actually be better at it.

Comments

[davidn]

A couple of people I know have learned of the existence of this journal, yes. Personally I can't wait to see the reaction to the whole rabbit thing.

I know I use the wrong term for he background versus the sprite layer early on, and feel terribly bad about it as you can imagine. I don't think I've noticed the phenomenon before in any NES game - perhaps it was the black background that made me notice it all the more - but you know I love this stuff, so please feel free to go into it and use terms like "panning register" as much as possible.

I was only half paying attention to the introduction as I rudely talked over it, but yes, I had definitely assumed that something else was wrong in addition to just being transported there to play with the princess. Especially as it had to be done by going through these other worlds - perhaps the whole game operates on dream logic and you have to spend the last few levels putting sunglasses on horses to power the airship.

I almost had a revelation then that the transformation animals differed from enemies because they didn't move, but the frog and lizard could hop or crawl short distances to annoy me. I believe that you can jump on enemies when you've possessed any animal, but not as your plain self - and those snails look evil enough to avoid whether inside one or not.

The artwork style did have a sort of Mega Man flavour to it, not that I've really played that either. I think that the artefacts might be a result of the intermediate format I record the video to before editing the channels together - I might have forgotten to switch it away from one of the heavily keyframed Xvid ones.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Well, panning register just about says it! The trouble is, the NES's tilemap is only exactly twice the size of the screen - and that's literally twice, not "twice in both dimensions i.e. four times". The developer can configure the 'two screens' to be laid out horizontally or vertically, which means that if you want to scroll in BOTH directions, one axis doesn't have any spare space to switch tiles where no-one's looking. (i.e., the tile that's leaving on the left is the same tile you're seeing wrap around on the right, so one of them has to be wrong.) And, if you're wondering why a mostly horizontal game didn't choose to have the vertical scrolling be the one that suffers, it's because the NES only has one tilemap layer, so the only way to have a status bar at the bottom is to put it on the same map as the level, and just change the panning registers to jump to a position that'll show it when the screen gets to that scanline.

Actually, interestingly enough (if your interest in the subject will permit me a tangent to share some trivia) scanline interrupts weren't actually built into the NES the way they were for virtually all later hardware... so, due to the relatively slow clock speed of the processor, you could never quite nail the start of a scanline precisely; and furthermore, due to the fact that the cycle length doesn't divide evenly into the drawing speed of the screen, you can't even nail it consistently in the same wrong place... watch the little white line at the top of the status bar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdI6wM4cnNc#t=4m25s). (The fact that glitches like these don't appear in some emulators is actually driving some people to write bottom-up cycle-perfect emulators, rather than the top-down sort that reproduce the designers' intentions... even if it means that it would take a 3 GHz machine to accurately recreate a Super Nintendo (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/08/accuracy-takes-power-one-mans-3ghz-quest-to-build-a-perfect-snes-emulator.ars).)

Oh, and if you're curious why the color always seems to be wonkier than the actual tiles when dealing with a can't-hide-the-scrolling situation, it's because (oddly enough) you can actually only define the palette for every four (2x2) actual tiles. It's kind of strange that they'd make an assumption that forces gameplay to revolve around logical pieces of a certain size, but allow you to define graphical information SMALLER than that size... I guess the idea is to be able to put bevels on corners and such?

Anyway, part of me wanted to say "why did they bother having two whole maps but only in one axis, instead of having one spare column and one spare row which is all you'd need for clean scrolling", but the fact is, the edges of these images couldn't even be seen on cathode ray TV sets; on my friend's TV, I could see some of UndoDog, but I was taking the existence of that arrow to his right on faith (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ki15GoFn0Io&feature=related#t=3m03s)... so, for hardware like the NES that was really counting on the glass working that way, a filter like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09jU1roDz9Y&hd=1&t=7s) might be ideal! (Although it makes me wonder why they didn't just make the deadzone on either side of the image bigger if they weren't expecting it to be seen anyway...) I guess the two-screen system was meant for Zelda-style scrolling, with the assumption that developers would want to pre-load the entire new screen rather than doing it column by column?

Anyway, I've now spent like three hours getting distracted doing research and watching youtube videos, so I think that's all I have to say on the subject for now ;) Although, the process of it has given me some interesting ideas, and I always relish the chance to get out some of the information I compulsively stuff my head with, so thank you ;)

[davidn]

Then thank you for doing that on my behalf! This is why I love the people that still hang around on Livejournal :)

It's fascinating how the things that you think are just random artefacts all have a reason somewhere deep down at the hardware level, like that white line that happens because you can't quite pick up on the line being drawn with completely accurate timing. I, too, wondered why there wasn't just the memory to store an additional row and column rather than an entire screen's worth of tiles... I hadn't realized that CRTs were imprecise enough for a chunk of the screen that large to go missing, when we all used them, even though I know most games of the PS era offered a "screen position" option.

I say quite often now that I realized that my impossible life's ambition was to be a game developer in the early 90s... and I'd probably have loved the puzzle-like aspects of tricking the hardware or coming up with the multi-layered workaround of the Doom engine in the absence of true 3D if there hadn't been any better way at the time, but at the same time, now I'm very glad that the abstraction exists to be able to concentrate on actual... game design.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I felt the same way when I first started learning about how all that stuff worked.... but then I started learning about modern GPUs, and.... oh my goodness, you have no idea how much cowboy programming is still going on just to make modern games look half as good as they do. :)

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

When you started talking about scanline interrupts, I had thought that you were going to start talking about the "Racing The Beam" book at some point.

The only reason I can think of the horizontal or vertical method of the tilemap was due to the simplicity of games like Super Mario Bros, where you could only move to the right. My guess is that they at least gave the ability to move in two directions (left/right or up/down) but maybe never considered that developers would want all four directions (i.e. "640k should be enough for everybody"), so it required some software finagling as you've mentioned above.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Also, I LOVE the idea of the story functioning on dream logic. :D Has anyone ever actually done that with a narrative?

[davidn]

Hmm, maybe Harvester? (There's blood near the start which I remember disturbing me in a magazine screenshot ages ago, although now it looks a bit... MS Paint-y.) It's renowned for not making any sense, with the story revolving around the Order of the Harvest Moon in the centre of the town which also houses the PTA and needing to get an application form to get inside, or something like that... that, combined with the live action cutout look of it, gives me the same uncomfortable feeling that Mortal Kombat did.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Oh, crap, I think I read about this in that adventure games book! Yeah, good call...

And, I find when watching videos of anything from that era that I had only ever seen in magazine screenshots, your imagination tends to assume a much more impactful experience than the awkward direction that cutscenes of the era got could actually provide...

[davidn]

Yes, that's very true. Whenever I read about something that I know or assume is meant to be frightening when seen, my mind always tends to assume the worst when it tries to fill in the gaps - this was why I held off on trying Trauma Center for so long before discovering that it was actually a great action/rhythmish-thing game.

I might try Harvester at some point, now that I'm thinking about it again, and face that lifelong fear/curiosity - though I'm accidentally developing a reputation for liking horror games, even though it's not so much a liking as a continuous being roped into playing them.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Why it's almost as though you're a sucker for punishment. ;)

[davidn]

Having something to complain about keeps me happy - it's why I've survived in America as long as I have!

[kjorteo]

No, dealing with enemies is very form-specific. Nemo basically can't (he can stun them for a bit with candy, that's about it,) some forms you already encountered such as the lizard and mole also completely can't, the frog can in the form of being able to jump on them ... it really depends!

(Also, the frog has no problem jumping on the snails.)

[davidn]

Right... when I said that, I couldn't remember whether I'd dared try it with the lizard (I knew the mole wouldn't work because you can't jump). I think at some point in the video, I do manage to jump on a snail while a frog by accident, even though I said that it looked like the best thing to do was avoid them.

You really were expected to do a lot of experimentation for yourself in games then, even besides the issue of most things being explained in the manual rather than the game - I'm suddenly reminded of the Lolo games, where some squares the enemies regenerated on were very important, but you couldn't tell if they moved or not until you tried. Now, it's important that you're able to recognize a game's language and cues very quickly.

[kjorteo]

And all the attempts you'd spend scouting, sacrificing your life to collect each heart framer one at time even though you haven't even begun to make it safe to collect any of them, just to see which ones gave you shots! Because that was important information when figuring out the solution to actually get them all for real.

But those were the only real issues--everything else was just rules of the game you had to learn once, and then it was consistent from then on. If I see a screenshot of a Lolo level, I would need someone to tell me A) which, if any HFs give shots, B) how many HFs it takes to unlock the hammer/bridge/arrow powers (if you have any that stage,) C) if there are any spawn-blocking shenanigans, and D) whether the Don Medusae (if there are any) move horizontally or vertically. Once I know that, I could just study the screenshot and solve it in my head.

God, I love Lolo games. I really need to go back and finish Lolo 3 at some point....

[davidn]

Yes, the shots/heart framers issue was the other one I was trying to remember! "Heart framers", another of those wonderful terms that can only be acquired through a precisely-tuned level of dodgy translation. In older games, that period of experimentation is just... accepted, even though I would consider it a real problem if I ever put a powerup that wasn't immediately visible into something like Boxplode. Now I'm thinking about putting something like that into Boxplode. No, I won't.

I went on to the Backloggery for the first time in ages to check where I'd got with the Lolo games, and suddenly remembered that I'd stolen their circular U/B/C icon style for one of the later things I did at my last job. Strange what sparks memories. Anyway, yes, apparently I did complete the first and second, which feels like a bit of a feat to me given how impossible they sound. I think that I remember the exact layout of the first level that stuck me in the third game, and even though it wasn't linear like the others, that felt discouraging enough to put me off it. I'll have to load it up again.

[kjorteo]

There, my Backloggery profile was itself in the backlog for a while, there, but I went ahead and at least gave it as much of an update as I could with games that came to me off the immediate top of my head. I'm sure there's more if I brainstorm, but oh, well. Anyway, thanks a lot for making me think of that until I just had to go back and do it.

[davidn]

I haven't looked at mine for a very long time either - I made an attempt at trying to remember every game I'd played at around the same time you first showed me Lolo, which is why your mention of it reminded me of the site, but being unsure where to really stop what with the massive number of PC and emulated titles I have downloaded, the task quickly became impossible.

I think you more than deserve an M for Trauma Center 2, even if you're not using it anywhere else!

[kjorteo]

Cs are for 100% completion and Ms are for self-imposed challenge runs above and beyond that! Though I suppose it could be argued that actually XSing the X operations could be considered above and beyond....

[davidn]

If there's anything that's "above and beyond" the reach of most anybody, that is surely it. My measures are flexible for the games, but for that... "Beaten" would be finishing the game in any way at all without the insanity of the X-operations, "Completed" for clawing one's way through those as well.

I tended to use "Mastered" if I'd written a reasonably comprehensive guide to a game, though I haven't done that in a number of years now.

[kjorteo]

Well, all right, fine, there. :)

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Though, if you look at the Frog's jump, the last thing you'd think is "my, that soft underbelly would be perfect for getting rid of those spiky snails..."

[davidn]

Yes, the visual cues this game provides are fairly misleading at various points! While being physically bigger does a lot to indicate that you're more powerful in some way, there's no way to really tell whether you're safe or not per creature. (Though like so many things at this point in game history, it could simply be a matter of seeing which ones are safe in the manual.)