Recently a topic started which had some awesome replies, one especially which made me think How the &^#$ did I not know that?
Then I thought - what other amazing pieces of gaming information history do people know and don’t share, assuming everyone else already knows them.
So I ask you, what do you know about the games of video that you just assume everyone else does, but is actually not as common as you think? Have fun, educate us and together we can all learn a bit more =)
werner herzog directed a movie based on a story written by the same person who wrote gears of war 4 thus putting werner herzog within 4 degrees of everyone on this forum
I may add other facts later as I see fit.
There was a video game pedometer for the… GameCube! It works with the Japan-only game Ohenro-San: Hosshin no Dojo (四国巡礼体験ゲーム お遍路さん 〜発心の道場（阿波国) 編 〜) which is a game where you can walk through a shortened version of a real-life pilgrimage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikoku_Pilgrimage) and digitally visit 23 temples from your own house ^^ Can’t say very many games let you do that! I really love when games really go for whatever they want, making whatever peripherals are necessary to see the vision through.
Also the controller, which you stand on, should rebrand to “world’s saddest Twister mat”
Source: Pedometer and Walking Pad Controller | Nintendo | Fandom
Someone uploaded a longplay of it too if you wanna check that out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sovVrKNWmGQ
How come you’re making this a limited time event? I’d kinda like to see this be a permanent fixture of the forum personally. I used to do a tumblr blog where I posted info like this with the goal of finding people to talk to about this wonderful junk, but no one wanted to chat, so I came here instead haha
The ones already done have been popular so thought it was about time to have another.
I’m not opposed to removing the timer at all, if there’s a desire to keep it open. Of course it may inspire a totally new topic which could be even better!
The designer behind LISA: The Painful is an accomplished martial artist.
Someone on the Lunar Silver Star Story art staff lifted the design of a stained glass pane from Chartres cathedral for the overlay in the temple to Althena.
The gba has the feature of ‘DS download play’.
Through a link-cable a gba game can send a bunch of data which another gba (with no cartridge) can then accept.
The data is placed in a specific part of memory and can be run, if the initial game was small enough, a whole game can be sent but like ds download play its usually a small portion or altered version of the game.
This seems to be called ‘Single Pak Link Multiplayer’. There seems to be a few lists of these around. I’ve only tried mario kart super circuit.
Irem made some Famicom cartridges with lights built in!
You can read more about them and see the whole set at Famicomblog: My New Sqoon: Missing those Lovely Irem LEDs
Some fans made their own light-up cartridges too which is real neat:
Fromsoftware spent their first decade in business making accounting software for Japanese companies, before suddenly deciding to pivot to video games.
And this may be common knowledge but King’s Field was named after a golf course in Scotland.
Billy Hatcher and Phantasy Star Online have GBA link cable stuff that unlocks GBA minigames relating to other Sega games like Chuchu Rocket, NiGHTS, and Puyo Pop. Which is really cool, especially cuz NiGHTS never came to the platform while the other two did so if you want to see that, here’s your chance! I wonder if that means they were planning a GBA NiGHTS port?
Gameplay
And check out these GameCube renders of GBAs ;u; that’s familial love at its finest. Video games rendering video game hardware is exactly my jam
There’s a super nifty first party Nintendo Game Boy Advance device called the Play-Yan (プレイやん) that lets you play MP3 and some video files off an SD card. But to me by far the best part is the ability to download minigames from Nintendo Japan’s site WHICH ARE AVAILABLE TO THIS DAY, apparently! Unfortunately the ability to play the minigames were removed from the “"updated”“ version, the Play-Yan Micro. I knew about these devices but not the games so I am very excited!
In all there are 13 games for the Play-Yan, which were distributed once a week and the last one was a Club Nintendo exclusive according to https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/20050221/playan.htm. MobyGames (https://www.mobygames.com/game/gameboy-advance/play-yan) says they were developed by the maker of the Warioware games, Nintendo R&D1, but I could not find any info about that, but it would make sense considering the style of the game and the avatar’s inclusion in their next game, Rhythm Tengoku (the first Rhythm Heaven game which is Japan-only and on the GBA) :D He would get at least referenced in every other game in the series, too.
More info about his appearances here:
You could also see him in the 3DS Sound Application!
In the time since I wrote this post, AKFamilyhome has since uploaded footage of every game being played! That used to not exist so I’m really happy that’s out there now ^^
The Play-Yan Micro came out in Europe so Nintendo released this promo image and - how did Nintendo get those songs downloaded hmmmmmm??? Why can’t we have them, Nintendo
You can read more about the Play-Yan here if you’re interested in the more technical details.
Also I looked into the state of emulation for this thing at Edge of Emulation: Nintendo Play-Yan - Part 1 and it’s been a very difficult process (due to it being a media player and all) requiring…making a GBA virus?? like so:
This is is a Japanese fortune-telling LCD handheld game (which explains the blood button, as blood type is used in Japanese fortune-telling, much like how star signs are used elsewhere)
Yes, they are called Herpits (ハーピット), which…I’m gonna assume means something nicer in Japanese than it does in English xD
They were made by Bandai in the 80s and 90s and check out these boxes
There’s even some called Petit Herpits (プチハーピット), like these star and books ones :D
These are great and I want to hit the blood button - but wow, that name! It’s up there with carddass
I don’t know anything cool or obscure enough to post in this thread, but I’m really enjoying everyone else’s contributions.
Might as well link to this obscure fact about the equally obscure game Puppet Zoo Pilomy.
You may have heard of the Library of Congress declaring a game canon in 2007 with the first ten games they deemed worthy of archiving. It was the work of several people including Henry Lowood. Here’s the list of foundational games (Wikipedia):
You’ll notice the sleight of hand by which ten games becomes more: counting Civilization twice and Warcraft at least three times (depending on how strict we are with the RTS designation). Also, can we collectively appreciate what a bold and distinctive choice Sensible World of Soccer is?
So the canon was declared and then – nothing. I can basically find two data points on this: they declared the canon in 2007, and several years later (2012) the Library of Congress had 3000 games archived. That’s it. There is no consistent web presence for the Library of Congress game canon, and they have not updated or added to this list. It is a dead canon.
Personally, I’m okay with that. Canons are a dated way to approach preservation, in the sense that no list perfectly captures what is worthwhile, and meanwhile a lot of the interesting stuff is in the ephemera or in the hard-to-preserve items.
Holy cow. PS1 memory card save file horror short story was not what I expected from ANY game. That’s crazy, I love it! I know someone who’s spent the last few months documenting PS1 Memory Card save file icons (at All Icons by Region – MemCard.art if anyone’s interested) and I shared it with him, I never expected to learn anything he wouldn’t know at this point, so I’m excited to see his reaction haha Thank you for sharing! It reminds me of those little sentences about each game you can see in the GameCube bios if you boot up the system before inserting the game
pedant hat 'pon my head - yonah is older in the end scene isn’t she? and the shadowlord in brothernier
How did I not know that the author Mona Simpson and Steve Jobs were separately adopted siblings? I’ve been reading her since the 90s
