"He's a genius, and I'm not saying that just to be nice."

May 1, 2017 10:03 AM

"The product of a talented programmer who designed a hit shareware game while he was still in high school, NESticle was so good that everyone looked past the fact its name was basically a dick joke."
posted by griphus (34 comments total)

oh shit, nesticle

I was perpetually astonished at how good the program was, even years and years after people had developed other emulators. Neat post.
posted by clockzero at 10:14 AM on May 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

NESticle was a work of genius, but I could never get past the crude humor in its interface. I can't understand the appeal of it. To create something so technically amazing but credit the software to "The Fecal Lord" in the About box and use a scrotum as the Windows icon? What the hell?
posted by Servo5678 at 10:16 AM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

the glory days of NESticle and playing (and being able to finish, thanks to save states!) all the NES games your parents never bought you is probably as close to the Singularity as we'll ever get
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:23 AM on May 1, 2017 [25 favorites]

NESticle taught me that if I had been able to save games as a child, I would have horribly horribly abused that function.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:28 AM on May 1, 2017 [8 favorites]

MetaFilter: a work of genius, but I could never get past the crude humor in its interface.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:31 AM on May 1, 2017 [7 favorites]

"basically"
posted by cortex at 10:35 AM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

To create something so technically amazing but credit the software to "The Fecal Lord" in the About box and use a scrotum as the Windows icon?

The product of a talented programmer who designed a hit shareware game while he was still in high school

I'm with you, but yeah.
posted by byanyothername at 10:35 AM on May 1, 2017 [6 favorites]

Because using computers to play videogames is probably the most serious thing you can do, and yearns for - no! DEMANDS a most serious user experience to go along with it.
posted by alex_skazat at 11:15 AM on May 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

It never took off in Latin America because he didn't realize that the name in Spanish means "It is not a tickle."
posted by straight at 11:15 AM on May 1, 2017 [9 favorites]

Here's a fun semi-related story: some guy makes a pretty fancy NES emulator (it can interface with a bunch of languages and rewind time) but can't open-source it yet because he never learned version control.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 11:25 AM on May 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

even with save states it still took a billion tries to get past those fucking eagles in Ninja Gaiden btw
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:31 AM on May 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

I think the ability to create Save States was what directly led to my frustration with any game that doesn't let you save at any time, and allowed me to see that I didn't actually like playing games that required long, slow mastery of a skill set that doesn't transfer anywhere beyond the game.

This is not true. Mastering one game helps you master others, and has real benefits towards critical thinking, or so I have observed anyway. But anyway....

Save states have their place, but in outright playing a game for fun? Why should you bother? What is you aim to enjoy a game as you play it, or to progress it to some arbitrary ending state? Most game endings aren't anything special. Building that skill is the point.
posted by JHarris at 11:48 AM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

A lot of games have difficulty spikes that would have kept me from getting to play the rest of an otherwise challenging-but-fun game if not for save states.
posted by straight at 11:57 AM on May 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

I want to see the levels and abilities and stuff the designers/programmers created. Getting good can produce a fun party trick (back in undergrad I one-lifed Contra a couple of times, because I went to the nerdiest parties), but I only care about being good enough to see the whole game.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:03 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Save states have their place, but in outright playing a game for fun? Why should you bother?

Define "fun," I guess. If I'm 95% of the way through the Mirage Tower in FF1 (to show you what era my expertise is from...), and my party gets knocked out by a freak encounter with the warmech, I don't feel like slogging aaallllll the way back through that level just to try again - instead, I'll save state before the warmech's lair, and beat it on "one try" in perceived external time, even if that amounts to 3 or 4 or even more tries that "should" have entailed running the whole damn dungeon again if save-state were not available.

On preview I agree with Pope Guilty. At this point in history I'm only willing to put so much time and energy playing NES, SNES, or N64 games. If I can use save state to let me experience the whole game instead of giving up 1/2 way though in frustration, so much the better.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 12:34 PM on May 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

even with save states it still took a billion tries to get past those fucking eagles in Ninja Gaiden btw

Makes me wonder if Battletoads even has an ending, or if it just kept getting harder until everyone gave up.
posted by stopgap at 12:35 PM on May 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

The implication that SNESticle has existed since 1997 and we've never gotten to see it because people are terrible, it burnsssss
posted by jordemort at 12:42 PM on May 1, 2017 [7 favorites]

What is you aim to enjoy a game as you play it, or to progress it to some arbitrary ending state?

If it's not the latter, I've been playing video games wrong for decades.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:43 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

even with save states it still took a billion tries to get past those fucking eagles in Ninja Gaiden btw

Battletoads. Jet Bikes.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:07 PM on May 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

I once convinced my father to buy (at a computer fair!) an expensive card for our Apple II+ that basically flash-saved whatever was running at the time, in the state it was running. Who knows what that was really for, but I totally needed it for the upper reaches of Snake Byte.
posted by chavenet at 1:20 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

One of the interesting things about the idea of save states vs. punishingly difficult action/platforming sequences is the way that that dynamic has been reclaimed as intentional design in some modern games. Not hard sections as gatekeepers with checkpoints to ease the pain (though that's certainly common in some games), but actually embracing the "fuck, reload from save state" loop and make it work for the game.

Super Meat Boy, for example, is a game constructed basically entirely of tiny individual set piece levels, and instead of being in any way apologetic for the difficulty of the levels the game simply embraces the idea that dying a lot rapidly and starting over is okay. So the levels are short. The number of discrete things you actually need to do to beat a given Super Meat Boy level is relatively small, and the time required likewise short—compare this to Joey Buttafoucault's example of plowing through an entire Final Fantasy 1 dungeon hoping for no freak catastrophes—and so it can get away with being haaaaaard.

And you restart fast when you die. Like immediately. Like "fuck, oops, try again, fuck, oops, try again" with zero friction so that you can just keep at it instead of having to sit through some (usually inadvertent, in some games gallingly intentional) additional punishment for failure in the form of protracted death animation and level restart mechanics. Super Meat Boy is a fucker of a game and I will likely never get good at it, but it does not bullshit the player about the idea that you're gonna fail a lot and that's okay. It just wants you to restore from save state and try again, so it builds it in.

Cf. the Trials games with their escalatingly difficult motocross trick riding/climbing/etc goofiness. Tracks are checkpointed generously and you can restart instantly, which is good because you'll end up trying the same segment fifty fucking times sometimes to manage to get your bike up and over a set of like four cruelly-arranged logs or I-beams or whatever. But the game knows you're going to do that, and makes it feel natural.
posted by cortex at 1:20 PM on May 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

(Excellent Warmech example)

Part of this is the idea that retro RPGs are kind of a narrative generator, where you personify those characters (often that you created) in your head and imagine their adventures. But that's only interesting if their adventures are inherently interesting (the pre-written story approach) or if there's an unpredictability to them.

[Note: the following is based on some research I did for the Bug Voyage book that didn't make it into the work because I wasn't 100% sure of how it operated.... there's a chance some aspect of it is incorrect.]

In any event... save stating to avoid Warmech is weird, because unless you know something about how Final Fantasy generates its encounters, you're likely to encounter Warmech again after reloading the state! Final Fantasy chooses when to generate an encounter by randomly picking the number of steps until the next encounter, and pretty much has decided ahead of time which encounter class will be generated. If a Warmech encounter is in the cards, the only way to avoid it is to be in a place with different encounter tables when it happens.

Anyway....

Thinking of a CRPG as a narrative generator harkens back to its roots in pen-and-paper play. The first CRPGs made this explicit -- Wizardry steps you through creating characters almost D&D-style, and the danger of permanent character loss seems to be modeled after the pen-and-paper model, and Dragon Quest was inspired pretty directly from that game and Ultima. But these are games based on explicit randomness more than playing skill, so if you're just trying to experience a pre-written story (which tends to be more involved than an ation game) then yes, save states make sense.
posted by JHarris at 1:34 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Well again I feel foolish. I never knew what the name NESticle was supposed to mean. In my defense I am a Mac guy so I have never used it or seen the icon. I have certainly seen its name on lots of lists of emulators going back to when it was new though. It never seemed any weirder to me than Stella, Frodo, Nestopia, etc. even though I could figure out the origin of those names. It's an interesting article outside of the naming thing. They say "When media outlets talked about emulation in the 90s, it was almost always in the context of the arcade emulator MAME." but I used console and other emus like Apple II, C64, etc. long before I tried MAME.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 1:40 PM on May 1, 2017

I'd like to go on the record that I'm not actually a fan of Super Meat Boy. When I talk about skill-building above, I can talk about it casually because, for me, it's something that's in the distant past. The general sense of gaming skill building is something I feel I'm over and done with, so specific cases, like grinding at a given Meat Boy a hundred times until I pass it, is not the kind of thing that's appealing to me.

I don't think it's just Super Meat Boy's difficulty though. I think it's more the sense that, most levels of that game, there's only one obvious solution, and the game is about implementing it as precisely as possible. Most NES games will give you a number of ways around a situation, allowing players of varying skill levels to pass most areas eventually.

Some games with sudden difficulty spikes, I seem to remember, were the result of the player not realizing the nature of the problem, or not using the resources they have at hand. Castlevania, for instance, contains a weapon, Holy Water, that can destroy four of the game's six bosses without much effort, and tellingly, there is a Holy Water subweapon in every level. The infamous Ironknuckles in Zelda II can be dispatched easily with practice with the proper technique (which involves jumping), but players who just hack away at them or try to get around their shields in standard combat will find them formidable challenges. These kinds of challenges force players to think outside the box in overcoming them. (There are still some challenges that are just nuts though, especially those places where there's only one solution cough Yellow Devil cough, and there I think save states are acceptable responses.)

Back to the subject.... It's worth noting that I've seen emulator authors trash-talk NESticle for a while for compatibility bugs and issues. As an emulator, it's really not all that great, although a lot of the issue has to do with the fact that NES and (especially) Famicom games often included custom silicon in the cartridge, called "mappers," to provide back switching, additional memory, extra sound channels and other features, and a truly accurate emulator has to account for all of them, of which there are dozens. There's also details like the precise timing and behavior of the hardware's interrupts, which, implemented inaccurately, could cause random games to just freeze up at the wrong time.
posted by JHarris at 2:00 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

NESticle was a work of genius, but I could never get past the crude humor in its interface. I can't understand the appeal of it.

This from the website that calls Donald Trump "SCROTUS."

Final Fantasy chooses when to generate an encounter by randomly picking the number of steps until the next encounter

Huh, fascinating. I really have used save states in FF1 emulations, and I was aware of the possibility that I would simply reload the same state of the RNG. I figured it was probably clock-based, though, so I would walk around an extra few seconds before going back to the area of the potential encounter. Turns out this had the intended effect, but for the wrong reason.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 2:43 PM on May 1, 2017

I remember trying to turn a friend on to emulation in like 1998. The first thing he said was "Hey, what's with the bloody hand?" It went down hill from there.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 3:16 PM on May 1, 2017

Oh yeah, the bloody hand!

This article is helpfully reminding me that I spent the bulk of my time as a teenager playing NES and SNES games on the computer in the basement. This article is like a window into aspects of my youth even I had forgotten about. Like, holy shit, the mention of Zophar's Domain sure takes me back.

It's funny, I remember noticing that NESticle was a dick joke, but I think I assumed that came with the territory of playing emulated games that I'd pirated off the internet. I think that whole scene kind of got me to expect people and things to have stupid, juvenile names.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 3:38 PM on May 1, 2017 [6 favorites]

Weird. I was just thinking about NESticle two days ago. My thought was along the lines of "Wait, no, it couldn't have been called that. I must be misremembering it."
posted by miguelcervantes at 6:21 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Man, this whole article with the UI screenshots takes me back in a big way. The internet in the nineties was mainly NES emulators (SNES and the like didn't really run on our 66 MHz 486), ZZT, and MegaZeux for me, and Nesticle was the only NES emulator that ran at an acceptable frame rate for most games. Throw in GB98 (full-speed Gameboy emulation on a 486!) and Callus (no audio, natch) and you've got what my computer time was spent on for the most part until I built that 233 MHz system that could run NeoRAGEx at full speed.

I do not miss that era of computers, with all the futzing around with config.sys and the like, but at the same time I do not regret having grown up during it.
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:48 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

oh also it was literally years until I found out that the ROM image of Nuts & Milk I downloaded back then was a hack to make the game filthier based on the title, rather than the way the game was designed from the start

good times
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:50 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

I figured it was probably clock-based, though, so I would walk around an extra few seconds before going back to the area of the potential encounter. Turns out this had the intended effect, but for the wrong reason.

Final Fantasy's RNG is weird, and I don't completely understand it. I read somewhere that it actually uses two RNGs, one for encounter step determination and one for the encounter.

Of particular note, all three 8-bit Final Fantasy games were programmed by Nasir Gebelli (previously), a brilliant Iranian-American who also implemented Rad Racer and 3-D World Runner, and also made Apple II games in the US back in the microcomputer era. John Romero of Doom and Quake fame has spoken warmly of him.

And yet, the first Final Fantasy was the first game of that style he had worked on, and so it founded an unfortunate tradition of the series that I happen to know persisted through to Final Fantasy VI at least, that being the games are all riddled with bugs. Spells that don't do anything, equipment stats that don't update properly, stats and conditions that have no game effect, overflow bugs, unused weapon stats, Houses that save the game before restoring your party's condition so when you reload you're both out the item and at your pre-use state (I noticed that one back in the day!), and most notoriously, weapon strengths vs. monster classes being completely missing, no matter what the Nintendo Power Player's Guide claimed.
posted by JHarris at 8:54 PM on May 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Makes me wonder if Battletoads even has an ending, or if it just kept getting harder until everyone gave up.

I played the shit out of this game back in the day. Wonderfully drawn, lots of fun, impossible. I remember thinking if they just had the Contra code this game would be the best game ever. I could get to the snake stage (2 after the air bikes!) pretty often and think I got past that once.

But then many years later I got a Game Genie and gave myself infinite lives. There is So. Much. More. Game. I got more and more infuriated playing it. All these interesting levels! Difficult challenges! And no one ever got to play it because they spent 3 seconds one day and decided to not include infinite continues because "Greg the QA guy can beat the whole game" or something.
posted by lubujackson at 9:23 PM on May 1, 2017 [5 favorites]

Battletoads was the best-made terrible game I've ever played.
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:26 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Battletoads is a game filled with great ideas and technical marvels, but most players never got to see most of it, because the jetbike level was level three. Rare had their fingers crossed that Battletoads would be the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, just that it would come into mass market millions with the video game first instead of the comics. They made an arcade game, ported it to the Genesis and did a bonkers crossover game with Double Dragon. They even made a pilot episode of a cartoon! But all those players who got the game could only read about the cool stuff later on in Nintendo Power.

Battletoads obviously made by people whose perceptions of acceptable difficulty had been warped a bit towards the short end of human reaction times. When you've paid $40 for something, that is a strong incentive to give finishing it a good go, but it's also a strong incentive to blame the game if you try and try and try and fail. It speaks for the Stamper brothers' business sense that Battletoads didn't sink the company.
posted by JHarris at 11:49 PM on May 1, 2017 [1 favorite]