Stumbling together through Snake, Rattle 'n' Roll - Part 1

[davidn]

As I felt I just didn't have enough video series in flight just now, kjorteo and I got together and revisited the game that started all of this in my life. Snake, Rattle 'n' Roll was a game that Kjorteo grew up with and mentioned to me when I was at work, in the context of the entire game being one continuous environment broken up into levels - and I wanted to do a playthrough of it and put up a video simply because doing a text one would have taken too long.

Getting the confidence to do that video was one of the best things that's ever happened to me - and though I didn't feel the gradual evolution over the last couple of years since I put that first one up, the difference in my voice between then and now is incredible... the original one is so timid!

Still, this time, Kjorteo was around to help - and through a surprisingly workable VirtuaNES netplay session, we bravely climbed the mountain towards the moon or whatever on earth is going on in this game. Our first chapter takes us halfway through the game by level count... but probably not by time spent or anger level. It's eighteen minutes, about five of which are spent on one screen.

http://youtu.be/8xhTttTVOiY

(Scrooge McDuck!)

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Hey, I SAID it was a compliment! ;)

Is there some ZZT-related visual pun going on as to what your various ASCIIvatars are?

It wasn't until I heard this new version that it occurred to me to question what your theme song is from! Did you write it?

Wouldn't PEEKs and POKEs qualify as the PC equivalent of a game genie? (Although I forget what platform they're for...)

(Is there a reason this video has black boxes on either side?)

Oh my goodness, I can't believe they expected people to be able to be able to clear all these jumps with a limited number of lives.....!

Dying by landing on the carpet XD "Aaaaaugh, I just hate carpets so muuuuuuuuch!"

Wait, how did getting that tongue extension from that carpet kill you...??

This game is a technical and creative accomplishment in a lot of ways, but they really didn't manage to capture the precision that the traditional NES paradigm of "limited chances" was built around...

"I'll pibble your nibbles" Down pibbles XD

Oh god, what kind of person puts a powerup to walk you off a cliff RIGHT at the end of the most awful platforming segment of the game XD Nintendo published this?? Apparently they didn't implement too much quality control....!

[davidn]

The ZZT thing started by accident... when I first did the introduction, it was meant to be symbolic of a PC upbringing being squashed by unexpected Nintendo obstacles (the Zelda boulder), but then as other people got involved I added ASCII characters for them. People in the ZZT community used to represent themselves in their games using specific symbols and colours (there was even a big file of them kept up to date with everyone's ZZT ASCII personas) so... this in a way is a continuation of that! (Although quadralien's @ sign came from the main character in Nethack.)

I did write the theme song! It was just a ditty that I put together quickly to be interrupted by the squish noise - I never revisited it until now, where I tried to make it more NES-like :) The pillarbox anti-widescreen is also thanks to the NES, as it has a very square output - I was going to brighten that up a bit with some borders, but... forgot to.

PEEK and POKE were commands in Commodore BASIC, and were probably available on the related micros as well... just pick a value, a location in memory, and stuff it in! That's memory management for you :) I'm not sure if on those there was any way to multitask to force values in memory on the fly without it being pre-programmed... and there was probably a TSR that did it for the PC, but I don't know if you could guarantee the specific address of a value in the say way as you could for the consoles.

And if you think this is bad, wait until you see the later levels! The game really is preposterous in terms of difficulty, a product of the era where games weren't really meant to be completed - rather, you would see how far you got before you inevitably died. You usually have nine lives including continues, and I think we've used about four hundred each by this point. I think this one must have been caught by Nintendo's quality control but then vetoed by Nintendo's brutality control.

[premchaia_pre4]

The closest Game Genie equivalent on the PC would just be patching the executable aforehand, I'd expect, if what I've read on the Web that they mainly operated by overlaying the ROM rather than trapping RAM accesses is correct. Since PCs use “soft” storage for program loading anyway…

Altering RAM accesses in flight is harder. On a modern machine, you might do that using a scriptable debugger and hardware-assisted watchpoints; if all the performance you need is from a decade ago, that's probably fine.

[davidn]

Oh, you know what - I forgot about the DEBUG command! The PC magazines I used to get were full of them - that and EDLIN were used to make subtle changes to files and executables and alter the behaviour of games, though I'm still not sure what DEBUG actually did on a technical level - I'll have to go and look it up.

[premchaia_pre4]

Allowed you to load executable images into RAM and then edit memory and registers and view disassemblies and run parts and do single-stepping and such, usually. So that would be a nice and more to the point nicely similar way of doing it if it could load the files involved (I'd forgotten about it too). Might have a harder time with the more complex programs though.

(Also it was used for writing out COM files with tiny useful machine language programs from magazines, using simple hex input using mainly the e/r/w commands, IIRC; you'd use e starting at 100 hex, then set CX to the number of bytes to write using r, and then w with the filename, wasn't it… ?)

[kjorteo]

David took his white :D face on blue background avatar because it's the default player character in ZZT and this was back before he had guest stars. For everyone else, he just sort of asked them if they had any character/color preferences. I'm a fellow ZZTer and put myself in a few of my own games, so I actually had a ready-made ZZTsona anyway. I've always been that sort-of-looks-like-a-sun character, you see, though the color has changed with my furry species and such. It used to be yellow in the ChocoboKick days, then blue for husky-Teo. David was the one who thought of the light-grey-on-dark-grey color scheme for making it woodrat-appropriate. :)

This video cuts out at the start of level 6 (out of 10 regular levels plus a stationary boss fight for level 11). On limited lives, no cheating, just my own skill and such, my single-player record is making it to the end of level 6 (well, to the fishtail/waterfall part, which I finally spent my last life in a failed attempt to clear.) The carpet bit at the end of level 5 ... somehow wasn't that much of an issue for me back then (because obviously I spent well over the 3 lives/3 continues threshold on that one stretch alone this time.) I don't know whether this is a lag/input delay thing or a "I used to be a lot better at this game, you know" thing, but I'm honestly tempted to admit it's the latter since the delay wasn't that bad. I mean, unless it was subtly messing me up, but ... no, this is just a really hard game anyway, I think. I mean, it's an NES game by Rare, it wasn't meant to be possible to complete by humans.

In my many years with this game, I have never seen anyone trigger the "you've fallen far enough to die from it" threshold right as he was about to land on the carpet with the exact timing needed to trigger that falling-into-the-carpet ... thing. That was amazing. Well done, David. :D

He didn't die by getting the tongue extension from the carpet. He died by jumping off the carpet, getting the tongue extension in mid-air, and then landing on the spike directly behind it. It's a bit confusing to parse for people who didn't grow up with this game, because there is no distinct "death by landing on a spike" animation; it just automatically triggers the "falling to your death" animation instead. (Note how I "fell" at around 7:05 despite being absolutely nowhere near the edge--that's because I landed on that spike.)

And trust me, if you think that was the most awful platforming segment of the game....

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

I'm just looking at the complete map of the mountain, and that final jump that you have to do to get to the last boss. I'm still horrified at what kind of distilled sadism would make someone put a level exit in the middle of a wall miles from anywhere at the end of an icy, sloping pathway like that. Whoever made this has no soul - or alternatively, feeds parasitically on the frustrated tears of others, I'm not sure which.

D.F.

[kjorteo]

The fact that I like this game suggests the latter.

[premchaia_pre4]

Er, that phrasing does just make me think “Flowey”…

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Somehow I hadn't realized how nice the music is in this game. Actually, the whole game seems nice: it's strange how, through the evolution of video games, we don't see games like this anymore. It is a fun game. I mean, yeah, 500 shooters are nice, too, but this one is also a good game, too!

. . .you also don't generally see enemy toilet seats anymore, either! The modern ear of gaming is really missing something. . !