HN Explorer

24 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 67.2 ms ] thread
saarons
I love these types of videos that dive into the nitty-gritty of how certain games work. I wish the author would have explained more why there is no position that the coin spawner works correctly in. Are they saying that while playing the game there's no way to move it, or that even if the coin spawner were placed correctly (on the ground) it would still not work?
sparky_z
No, the video is saying that if the coin spawner were in the usual location (above ground) it would work fine. It postulates that this was an oversight: at one point the ground was raised (to provide a ramp for the bowling balls) and they forgot to raise the spawner with it.
jandrese
I took it to mean that however he is hacking the game doesn't support moving coin spawners. That part honestly confused me too.
kibwen
He's certainly capable of hacking the game to move the coin spawner via third-party tools; what the video is demonstrating is that there's no way to move the spawner while in-game using only button inputs on the control pad.
jandrese
Shouldn't that be obvious? Or is this like those crazy hacks where they glitch the game with extreme controller input and cause it to branch immediately to the end screen?
ursus_bonum
IIRC some of his other videos show how you can duplicate and move objects around in-game.
no_protocol
The exploration and reasoning here is like a detailed report on a science experiment. I liked the layout of the presentation from noticing an incongruity to explaining exactly what was happening. Then the video surprised me by putting forth a hypothesis on why the 'world' was the way it was.

It has benefits over real-world experimentation because the fundamentals of the system are known and everything can be observed. No messy approximations are needed. Most guesses can be confirmed. But then we still end up with an unconfirmed hypothesis about how the situation came up in the first place. Reasoning is presented but there's no way to confirm it beyond asking...the creators.

The tooling used to recreate certain game situations is like a magical testing apparatus that doesn't really exist in the real world.

kentf
I respect the amount of effort and time that goes into videos like these. It's the best part of internet.
mipmap04
Check out the SM64 parallel universes video if you really wanna get your mind blown.
XaspR8d
Yeah, most of the detailed explanations are on his main channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/pannenkoek2012/videos

Discovering how to gain enough speed to clip into modulo copies of the level is one thing, but extending that and finding surfaces that can deflect you in useful directions is a totally different level of commitment. (Also I'm curious how he managed to create the relative view--did he hack the ROM to fix that? I'm sure he mentions it somewhere.)

loeg
It's basically debugging, but without the source code. And some arcane bug the designers didn't care to fix decades ago :-).
wnevets
I love development postmortems of games from my childhood.
raldi
I'd like to see a video of someone playing a modified version of this level, with the original slope restored.
paulpauper
I know it's a little late but I'n entitled to a refund. or Nintendo should release a patch. lol
cazum
Didn't even have to click the link to know it was Pannen. The guy truly embodies the concept of Virtual Exploration.

If you haven't done so already, go ahead and watch his Watch For Rolling Rocks .5 A Press commentary.

0x0
Awh I wish he'd shown a hacked implementation of slope X and how the bowling balls would have rolled the other way :)
anmo
This is some fine digital archaeology.