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Kurui Reiten posted:It is not. Nor is Justin Bailey. NARPAS SWORD is the only intentionally programmed one, the rest are just coincidental outputs. You can start telling, however, if you find oddities in the decoded save format, values that should be contiguous but aren't. Which is in fact the case for Metroid. You can pretty much divide the decoded save state into world state (what's been picked up/destroyed), Samus' status, then the game timer. But instead of being in that order in the save state, it's all but a couple bits of world state and Samus' status (where to start, what power ups you have, how many missiles you have), then the timer, then the missing bits of world state. There's no reason for doing it like that except to make your life harder (those values are in the right order in ram, for example), unless it's specifically so that when the shift byte (which controls a basic encryption) is at its max value (prompted by the - character) the encrypted password will move that final world state block back at the beginning of the password, grouped with the others, and specifically the missile amount and game time will get shifted to the second line. Basically the whole thing's been deliberately designed so that if the second line of the password is all 1 in binary, and so all dashes in text, you'll specifically get maxed out missiles and a maxed out timer which wraps back to 0 on the next frame, conveniently giving you a way to legitimately time your game, and freedom to set up Samus and world states as long as the checksum holds which, it turns out, is easy because there's a whole unused byte on the first line, allowing you to manipulate the checksum (itself a byte) freely. So at the very least the ------ ------ part of the password isn't coincidental at all, it was designed so it'd produce that result. And then that first line is weird as hell too. Instead of stuff like missiles containers being contiguous and all power ups being contiguous you'll get stuff like two missiles, a door, then seven missiles, a door, a power up, a door, a power up, two missiles, etc... So again, the values have been shuffled around to align to specific characters. Not obfuscation, because the ------ ------ line shows they didn't really care about players being able to match max values directly while on the other hand they definitely were looking to produce some specific patterns, which lead us back to Justin Bailey, which produces an unusually clean save state. If the save state was kinda approximate (not all missiles, some door pattern) like the DBZ or pokemon ones, or glitchy like ridley MF, I'd accept the coincidence, but here with that weird bit ordering that'd just happen to match the right text, I don't believe it one bit (hoho). While there are 2^136 (way beyond billions of billions) viable passwords, there's only 256 that'll produce this specific save state while producing the ------ ------ pattern, and only one of them is legible. It'd be interesting to source the first appearance of the code though. This article mentions a Nintendo Power from 1991, but it turns out the french Nintendo club newsletter already had it in 1990, and is attributing it to a british reader named Matthew Standbrook, who likely had copied it from somewhere else. I guess a look at the british Nintendo club newsletter could be worth a look.
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Oct 28, 2019 03:11
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Ah, the good old difficulty of understanding probability. Curse you, human pattern recognition!
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Oct 28, 2019 11:31
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Ah, the good old difficulty of reverse engineering password formats. Curse you, technical illiteracy!
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Oct 28, 2019 12:10
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I haven't programmed a password system myself because they're pretty obsolete nowadays but i can tell you that the bitfields for the metroid passwords look exactly how i "order" my bitfields when i use them in assembly. Roughly packed by use area (locations in metroid), sometimes padded, but more or less random or as their usage comes to mind. Like heck am i gonna reorder all my memory and code just because i want to put another missile over here. gently caress it, it's going at the end of the area list. Pointedly, all the "item taken" and adjacent door bits are still next to each other, because, well, they were established in quick succession. The distribution is quite orderly and not as random as your post would have you believe. Most importantly, the notion that even a single grammatically correct password that also produces a seemingly flawless game state satisfying some subjective arbitrary conditions (and for a bit field where only like 3 out of 4 values even do anything) among the 8.7e+40 valid passwords is so unlikely that it has to be intentional? Lol
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Oct 28, 2019 12:25
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HenryEx posted:I haven't programmed a password system myself because they're pretty obsolete nowadays but i can tell you that the bitfields for the metroid passwords look exactly how i "order" my bitfields when i use them in assembly. Roughly packed by use area (locations in metroid), sometimes padded, but more or less random or as their usage comes to mind. Like heck am i gonna reorder all my memory and code just because i want to put another missile over here. gently caress it, it's going at the end of the area list.
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Oct 28, 2019 13:59
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I went to school with a kid named Justin Bailey who didn't believe it until someone showed him
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Oct 28, 2019 15:17
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I went to a school with a JC Denton. Unfortunately this was before I played Deus Ex so I couldn't make jokes about it with him. He did give me a free copy of FFVIII, though.
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Oct 28, 2019 15:24
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Phantasium posted:I went to a school with a JC Denton. Unfortunately this was before I played Deus Ex so I couldn't make jokes about it with him. What a shame.
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Oct 28, 2019 15:25
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the data in the justin bailey save isn't really that clean or at least it's not the scattering of data I would expect had it been intentional the bosses, missile count, and time are pretty much optimal (although I'm not sure I get why you would set the game time to overflow instead of just setting it to 0) but it starts you with only 5 energy tanks, the ice beam hasn't been collected yet, only the second and fifth zebetites are destroyed, and the missile containers and unlocked doors have no apparent pattern to them if you go to https://www.truepeacein.space/ there's a Metroid password generator & decoder with a pretty good visualizer for what gets flagged this is justin bailey:  the visualizer is missing the flags for whether a power-up exists in the game world (which are different from the flags for whether or not samus has the power-up) and I haven't looked at the 1's and 0's myself but I'd be interested to know if there was some inconsistency there that said, it's an interesting theory and I thank you for sharing it, Chev, I'm just not sure I buy it
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Oct 28, 2019 18:24
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https://i.imgur.com/CyyPZ4O.mp4
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Oct 28, 2019 18:35
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Welp this is intentional. Cubone clearly came up with that name back in the 80s and programmed it into Metroid. I hope you saw some of the Pokemon money
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Oct 28, 2019 18:39
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Cubone posted:that said, it's an interesting theory and I thank you for sharing it, Chev, I'm just not sure I buy it Haven't been able to trace earlier than Matthew Standbrook for the source of the code but of course there's tons of magazines to check, that'll take a while.
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Oct 28, 2019 20:15
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Context is that this is from the game Race With Ryan, which is a kart racer whose license is an insanely popular childrens YouTuber who goes by the handle Ryan ToysReview. His character model is the one being ripped, so this is ostensibly a portrayal of a real living seven year-old boy. https://twitter.com/TiniestTurtles/status/1190415712977932288 https://twitter.com/TiniestTurtles/status/1190432300149985280
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Nov 3, 2019 00:12
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Probably a bored dev who isn稚 super happy to be working on a shovelware kart racer based on a 7 year old youtuber.
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Nov 3, 2019 00:34
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edit: double post
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Nov 3, 2019 00:35
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One of my favorite parts of the ancient 2004 TG Metroid game I played in was one of the players had a character named Justin Bailey, who died like a HERO The code is completely coincidence and not by intent like the NARPAS SWORD is, but it痴 way more fascinating to wonder who exactly figured it out and how it got passed on
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Nov 7, 2019 17:58
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Tabletop Metroid game? What were you using, gamma world?
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Nov 7, 2019 20:00
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Bogart posted:Tabletop Metroid game? What were you using, gamma world? GURPS. It's probably still in the archives. Still one of my fondest SA memories. It started right after chaos night.
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Nov 7, 2019 20:22
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3902704 I'm sure this thread will get a kick out of this
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Nov 11, 2019 06:24
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fishmech posted:Here's a good guide to what data is encoded in Metroid NES passwords: If you've got a link to someone who knows what the missing bits encode -or suggestions for what to google - I'd love to see it. I've just finished writing a random-password generator based on the link you posted and I'd like to fill in the missing values if possible. 
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Nov 12, 2019 05:16
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For those who still care about Petscop, the creator has been found. https://twitter.com/pressedyes/status/1194696778534273025 He came forward after Reddit found his old indie game, Nifty. I'm honestly surprised it took this long for anyone to figure this out as there are plenty of dead giveaways in that game. Here's some footage where you can see the various symbols seen in Petscop, music that was reused, and a reference to Garalina. There's some cool early concept art going back to 2009 on his Twitter. He also confirms the series is over except for one thing. It's not clear if that's another video or something else. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but they also found he wrote a story called Tapers about a guy named Marvin kidnapping a girl named Care. J-Spot fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Nov 15, 2019 |
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Nov 15, 2019 16:32
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.........of course it'd be the Nifty guy. Christ, how obvious in retrospect. Cool.
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Nov 15, 2019 16:50
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Aw man Petscop just became 100% less interesting. The last thing I ever wanted was clarification or closure.Besesoth posted:If you've got a link to someone who knows what the missing bits encode -or suggestions for what to google - I'd love to see it. I've just finished writing a random-password generator based on the link you posted and I'd like to fill in the missing values if possible. According to this, out of the 12 unknown bits, one is actually part of the spawn point encoding except it never got used because there aren't that many spawn points, one is preserved by the game state but doesn't seem to do anything and the remaining ten are outright ignored, they're just padding and the game will never set them to anything but 0 when generating passwords even if you loaded a password where they were set. Chev fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Nov 15, 2019 |
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Nov 15, 2019 17:15
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Same but for the opposite reason; knowing that it's over means that a lot of the remaining mysteries will probably go unexplained.
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Nov 15, 2019 23:44
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Whats the odds of last video entry (entries?) vs releasing Petscop the Game?
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Nov 16, 2019 21:18
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Imo the chances of the game being playable are close to 0.
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Nov 17, 2019 01:25
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I never wanted the creator revealed because I was worried they'd turn out to be an rear end in a top hat or something, so I'm glad that it's just some random dude and we get some background info.
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Nov 17, 2019 01:34
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umalt posted:Whats the odds of last video entry (entries?) vs releasing Petscop the Game? Probably none https://twitter.com/pressedyes/status/1195823958840532996?s=21
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Nov 17, 2019 01:40
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field balm posted:Imo the chances of the game being playable are close to 0. I remember in the early days of Steam opening the floodgates to indie developers there was a game that eventually got delisted because it was a mystery exploration game but it turned out that none of the stuff you could interact with in the level actually had any scripting to connect it to anything else and all the levels in the install directory were just duplicates of the first level's file, he should have released a Petscop "game" that is similarly useless and see how many hours people would spend wandering around and interacting with things trying to figure out the secret that surely must be there.
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Nov 17, 2019 01:43
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Good to know that is where Petscop's ended (mostly). It felt like that was the case, but in a project like that there's a lot of potential for it to just be drawn out to an indefinite point.quote:I remember in the early days of Steam opening the floodgates to indie developers there was a game that eventually got delisted because it was a mystery exploration game but it turned out that none of the stuff you could interact with in the level actually had any scripting to connect it to anything else and all the levels in the install directory were just duplicates of the first level's file, I actually think this one's pretty fascinating. The first level has objects that can technically be interacted with and it's just complex enough to give the illusion that something's happening -- these lights go on, these go off, and the opening hint implies you have to somehow turn them all off -- but when people actually cracked its code they learned that everything was just attached to an 'on/off' switch and didn't actually have any meaningful triggers, and also didn't have any end level trigger at all. As said, when people dug into the code more, they found that they could load the second level but it was just the first one again, and that the other levels weren't even populated-- they had chapter-opening slides but no associated levels (and so would just load Level 1/Level 2 again). The game creator claimed that a day one patch he put out for the game somehow caused this catastrophic 'bug', but over the next couple of weeks he kept making apologies and excuses and then went completely silent. Given that the obvious solution for this would be to roll back the update and somehow this never happened or even came up in the dev's discussion, it's pretty clear that it was a scam. There was even a cute little wrinkle where hints to each level could be found in the game's Steam cards... which only start popping after you've put in at least two hours into the game, which is the cutoff for getting a refund, so people would be encouraged to roll around the open landscape turning lights on and off hoping to unlock progression clues until it was too late to get their money back. This is unfortunate because it actually sounds like there would've been a really cool puzzle game behind this according to the way one person managed to progress past level 1 (ostensibly-- I think it managed to load the Level 2 card but kicked them back to Level 1, since, you know, no other levels exist). The clue you're given for the first level is "Don't go toward the light", and somebody managed to push their little mist-ball over the edge of the map (into the darkness beyond the level). This was likely a bug, but it got me thinking it would be pretty cool to have a puzzle game where the solutions were actually based on glitches and game limitations rather than actually solving a puzzle. Like in this case-- you can explore this whole little forest and play with the lights all you want, but it's impossible to turn them all off and the actual solution is to find a way to force yourself to respawn because the respawn point is actually in an otherwise inaccessible part of the map. (This was actually used in the opening level of Kaizo Mario 64, where you have to kill yourself to reach the blocked-off respawn point to use a cannon to get into the castle door. It also constantly set you on fire, which is a far less cool idea.) I'd also had an idea of doing something similar by forcing the game to overload actors in order to despawn a door, or do something similar to force artificial lag in order to get past an environment where the obstacles are too fast for human reflexes. I know there are games out there that play with the idea of 'hacking' them in order to proceed, but this is less based on breaking into the game's code (or having the illusion of doing so) as it is exploiting common programming flaws and oversights in order to glitch out what is otherwise a functionally impossible game. You can logic out the solutions, but since the game is still structured like a game (as opposed to breaking the fourth wall and acknowledging its medium) you have to constantly be keyed in to lateral solutions to otherwise normal video game puzzles or obstacles.
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Nov 17, 2019 03:19
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NonsenseWords posted:This was likely a bug, but it got me thinking it would be pretty cool to have a puzzle game where the solutions were actually based on glitches and game limitations rather than actually solving a puzzle. Like in this case-- you can explore this whole little forest and play with the lights all you want, but it's impossible to turn them all off and the actual solution is to find a way to force yourself to respawn because the respawn point is actually in an otherwise inaccessible part of the map. to toot my own horn a little, Labyrneath II has a level that requires you to exploit the game's crude checkpoint system, throwing yourself into spikes to effectively un-jump out of a hole another one later turns the fact that enemy projectiles despawn off screen into part of a puzzle, as you have to basically babysit a bullet all the way to a destructible block I thought about going wilder with that sort of thing but it would be a better fit for a
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Nov 17, 2019 12:38
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Chev posted:According to this, out of the 12 unknown bits, one is actually part of the spawn point encoding except it never got used because there aren't that many spawn points, one is preserved by the game state but doesn't seem to do anything and the remaining ten are outright ignored, they're just padding and the game will never set them to anything but 0 when generating passwords even if you loaded a password where they were set. Aha, thank you!
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Nov 17, 2019 18:19
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This thread is still the best. 1973. I知 so glad it痴 still going. I have zero content to provide I just wanted to say that.
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Nov 17, 2019 18:27
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Remember a bit ago when we were talking about creepypasta and how it's almost always bad, especially video game ones? I learned that on the Creepypasta Wiki in recent years they've attempted to seriously crack down on the garbage with an angrily-worded rules page along with a word blacklist. https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Creepypasta_Wiki:Spinoffs?useskin=oasis In addition, for those who haven't seen them, a few years back, Slowbeef did dramatic readings of some of the worst and funniest video game creepfic that he could find. These ones are all gold and range from babby's first writing project to angry older sibling makes fanfiction where his younger sibling kills himself to some clown uses a thesaurus for every single word and takes 12 paragraphs to describe 5 seconds of action. https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo4M1tlpv9rt9Q3mdIHWdeNBGU-riKEsT Lastly, the other night out of curiosity I looked at what were the all-time most popular stories on the wiki. The ones that were so popular to have dozens of readings on Youtube, fan art and fan videos, and have readers beg the author to finish it. This is one of them: https://badcreepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Happy_Appy It seems like a few years after the original and its sequels were finished and re-written several times, the author pulled a Tommy Wiseau and said "Ha ha actually it was meant to be bad and a black comedy all along, looks like I really owned you guys huh :P" As far as I know, it was genuine and is one of the funniest pieces of horror media I've ever read. Every update gets worse and it becomes obvious the entire thing was flow of thought and the backspace key was never used.
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Nov 19, 2019 19:18
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 the runway is clear for bubsy.xls
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Nov 19, 2019 19:42
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But I must have my fic based around office worker and desk clerk Jeff!
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Nov 19, 2019 19:44
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How many of those bad stories involved losing wrestling matches to Jeff
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Nov 19, 2019 19:47
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Well you know something Slenderman brother in a normal four way match you got a 25% chance of winning but I知 not normal brother. I知 a hedgehog
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Nov 19, 2019 19:49
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Cartoon Violence posted:I learned that on the Creepypasta Wiki in recent years they've attempted to seriously crack down on the garbage with an angrily-worded rules page along with a word blacklist. even the way some of these rules are written are kind of overwrought and dramatic imho, but this one got a good chuckle out of me: Creepypasta Wiki rules page posted:13. No ROBLOX. There is no way to make ROBLOX scary. Ever.
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Nov 19, 2019 19:51
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Bogart posted:Well you know something Slenderman brother in a normal four way match you got a 25% chance of winning but I知 not normal brother. I知 a hedgehog and that's why it spells disaster for Jeff at Sacrifice
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Nov 19, 2019 19:58
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