Off Day

Here we are on Leap Year Day. It only comes once every four years, but unlike the Olympics, it goes unnoticed or is even treated as a nuisance; one more obstacle to overcome before the first of March and the start of spring. I'm going to take advantage of this day, though, because who knows how many you've got left?

Speaking of making the most of what life hands you, here's a smart mouse hack I found on the RetroPie forum. For years, I've been trying to make my own arcade-style spinner on a slim budget, but this guy nails it, using a flanged pillow block ball bearing to get just the right distance between the mouse sensor and the bottom of the dial. Too much clearance and the sensor won't read what's above it; not enough clearance and the dial grinds instead of spinning freely. The ball bearing is designed to float a millimeter above wherever it's set, the sweet spot for a mouse sensor, and the assembly is made of metal, so there shouldn't be any of the sagging that foiled my previous attempt at building a spinner.

Spin, spin! Spin the black (cardboard) circle!
(image from UDb23 of the RetroPie forum)

The ideal solution would be if someone mass-manufactured a jog dial for computers that didn't cost a small fortune and worked right out of the box, but I've resigned myself to the bitter reality that this is just never gonna happen. At the moment, I'm desperate enough to play Arkanoid and Cameltry the right way to build the damn thing myself.

Thirty Lives, Minus One

I recently learned on Twitter that Konami developer Kazuhisa Hashimoto, creator of the iconic "Konami code," has died at the age of 61. I've got a lot of memories of this lengthy, yet easy to remember series of button inputs... it was essential for less skilled players to finish games like Contra, and when the Super NES was released, it was used to troll gamers who'd gotten too dependent on it. Enter the classic Konami code in Gradius III and it seems to work for a couple of seconds, until your ship explodes. Turns out that you have to change the left and right in the code to the left and right trigger buttons on the top of the Super NES controller to make it work properly. Pretty sneaky, Kaz!

I even slipped the code into one of my own games back in 2005. Press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right on the joystick in Solar Plexus, then flip the left difficulty switch on the back of the Atari 2600 from B to A. Once you press fire, you're taken to a simple game of Pong, where the paddle reads "I am not" and the ball is the classic four flags Konami logo. Admittedly, that space on the cartridge could have been put to better use, but it nevertheless felt pretty good to be the first person to bring the Konami code to such an old console. Even Konami's own three 2600 games didn't have it!

Oh, and one other thing. If you happen to have the Konami Arcade Classics collection for the Game Boy Advance, the code can be used to trigger all kinds of goodies in the cartridge, ranging from extra stages in Rush 'n Attack, Gyruss, and Time Pilot, to remastered versions of Frogger and Scramble with enhanced graphics. These bonuses elevated an already competent compilation into one of the system's most ambitious and rewarding, and it may not have happened if it hadn't been for the work of Kazuhisa Hashimoto.

You Cat Take It You

Well, that came out of left field. Hasbro plans to revive the Tiger Electronics line of handhelds, starting with games based on Sonic the Hedgehog 3, X-Men, and Transformers. These won't be exact duplicates of the original games released in the early 1990s, but rather will be "inspired" by them, which doesn't tell you much about the finished products. Should we expect any improvements from the original designs, like color screens or more realistic sound effects? Perhaps, but with a retail price of $14.99, you probably shouldn't get too optimistic.

Most people don't look back fondly on Tiger handhelds... they were never up to the standards of Nintendo's Game and Watch series, and by the mid 1990s, these budget-priced systems were biting off way more than they could chew. Would you believe Castlevania: Symphony of the Night got the Tiger handheld treatment in 1998, the same year Nintendo released the Game Boy Color? It happened, but heaven only knows why.

However, when you're too young to know better, and too poor to afford better, you take what you can get. Back in 1987, I got a Tiger Electronic Pinball for Christmas, and it proved invaluable as a time-waster for those long, uncomfortable trips from one divorced parent to the other. There's little point in these stone-age handhelds now, but once upon a time, they had their place.

Monkey's Paw with One Finger Extended

If you've got Xbox Live Gold or Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, you can play Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD for free through the weekend. This is good, because you can play the first couple of levels, foam at the mouth after dying to the cyborg orangutan boss a dozen times, and vow to never play it again. Congratulations, that's twenty-five dollars you won't be wasting!

People have had the gall to complain that Banana Blitz HD isn't hard enough, since many of its stages have guard rails which made them more manageable back when the game was designed for motion controllers. These people clearly have not had the pleasure of fighting the eighty foot long dragon at the end of the fourth level. The good news is that it can be brought down by pressing a button on its forehead. The bad news is that it constantly fires clusters of homing missiles, ensuring that you'll be launched off its back before you get anywhere near that weak point.

Same to you, game. Same to you.

Anyway, I'm writing this to discuss the latest Mayflash controller adapter, the Magic S Pro. I had reviewed the company's Universal Adapter a couple of years ago and was pretty pleased with it... it still gets pulled out from my pile of random controllers whenever I need my Killer Instinct or King of Fighters 2002 UM fix. 

However, I'm not as happy with the Magic S Pro. It's not Mayflash's fault... the adapter works as intended, and can even be used with Bluetooth controllers, a feature missing from the Universal Adapter. However, it can't be used with the handful of PS2 Classics released for the Playstation 4, thanks to Sony's short-sighted and inflexible design. 

One thing Mayflash DOES deserve criticism for is
the tiny, barely tactile mode switch button on the
side of the adapter. Maybe your pet ant could
hold it down for you.
(Image from Amazon)

Those titles map start and select to the touchpad, which works fine with a Dual Shock 4 but doesn't adapt well, or at all, to any controllers you'll connect to the Mayflash adapter. They don't even work with some official PS4 controllers without a touchpad, like the Hori Fighting Commander. It effectively makes it impossible to play SNK's nine PS2 Classics with a joystick, which is what these Neo-Geo and Atomiswave ports were designed for in the first place.

Luckily, there's a solution. It's a stupid solution, but it's a solution. If you connect a wired Playstation 3 controller to the second USB port of the PS4, then pick the game you wish to play, you can use its start button to get past the attract mode in SNK's games. Technically, you wouldn't even need the Magic S Pro... you could start the game with the Dual Shock 4 and use a legacy controller to play it. However, if you want to use a wireless joypad like 8BitDo's M30, this will be the only way you'll have access to start and select. 

By now, you're probably thinking "It's not really a wireless experience if you have to reach for the other controller to continue!" Yeah, that's why I said it was a stupid solution.

More Room for Doom

Sometimes I just don't get ROM hackers. Case in point... someone (actually four someones) went to the trouble of improving the Game Boy Advance version of Doom, nearly twenty years after its release and over twenty-five years after the game made its PC debut. Is this hack, called the PC Doom Total Conversion, better than the original? Certainly. I'm not a fan of this series and some of the changes are obvious enough to smack even me in the face. Let me dig up a couple of photos...

The original by Activision and David A. Palmer Productions

The hack by KippyKip, Doomhack, et al

There's no question the hacked game looks more like the PC version... the red blood has been restored, numbers in the heads up display are more detailed, textures have more definition, the colors are no longer washed out for the sake of the old, unlit Game Boy Advance, etc. It goes a little deeper than just visuals, though. Notice the pit in the center of the screen in the Doom hack. Now notice that the pit isn't there at all in the original game, likely removed to lessen the burden on the design team. I haven't been through the entire game, but this stage alone has several areas which weren't in Activision's port, and I suspect the Toxin Refinery is only the tip of the iceberg.

So I've got to give KippyKip and his crew credit for their work, but at the same time, I have to wonder if all this was necessary. The original Game Boy Advance version of Doom got high marks from the press, with a Metacritic average of 81%. It wasn't perfectly faithful to the PC game, but the fact that someone got Doom running on a handheld in 2001 made it easy to overlook the omissions.

Beyond that, the Game Boy Advance isn't the ideal place for a port of Doom. Yes, this hack is better than the original, but with the limitations of the GBA as an anchor, there's no way it can stack up to conversions for later handhelds. Out of curiosity, I fired up Doom Legacy for the PSP, and it's so much better than its Game Boy Advance cousin that it's hard to imagine why anyone would take that step back into the past. 

Sprucing up a Game Boy Advance conversion of Doom (which was more of a novelty than a viable way to play the game even in 2001) is rather like welding a jet engine to the roof of a Volkswagen Bug. Sure it might actually work, but uh... why? 

But hey, what the hell do I know. Doom has popped up on worse.

Shake Thine Rump

Desperate to get some use out of my Disney Plus subscription, I watched the straight-to-video sequel to The Lion King. It wasn't great, as is usually the case with American OVAs, but at least the battle near the end was entertaining. Now where have I seen this before...?

Also, Suzanne Pleshette was pretty good as Geese. Er, Scar. I mean, Zira! Who knew the wife from the Bob Newhart Show could play someone so nasty?

Anyway. I should mention that I tried the Ghosts 'n Demons fan remake. On the plus side, it goes a long way toward improving the Wonderswan game, adding not just color but improved physics, a soundtrack that doesn't make you cringe, and new abilities including a Castlevania: Rondo of Blood inspired backflip. It feels more in line with the original Ghosts 'n Goblins trilogy, rather than some cheesy sequel tossed off by Bandai.

On the downside, GnD has the same aspect ratio as Makaimura for the Wonderswan, and feels slightly cramped as a result. Worse than that, the game was developed in a game design utility rather than made from scratch in a programming language, and consequently, load times are pretty horrendous. We're talking two minutes to reach the title screen and thirty seconds to load a stage, which is hard to justify for a game of its vintage.

In addition to all that, Arthur can twerk now. Just hold down and the gesture button, and our hero shakes his armored booty like Carmen Electra on an MTV spring break special. There's no part of the game that requires you to do this, but its inclusion is nevertheless bewildering, like truck nuts on a hearse.