We take the distribution of game updates for granted these days. So long as the download happens in an acceptable amount of time, everything is fine. Sometimes the patch notes matter. Sometimes they don’t. Whatever. Game on. Meanwhile… the previous version of that game? It will never be seen again. In the cartridge days, this […]
NES Strider feels janky. We’ve known that since it was released. But how bad could it be? … Oh! Absolutely terrible! Jumping, running into a wall, and falling – simple things in any other game seem to be half-baked in Strider. The physics are worse than you could possibly imagine. Why do you slam your […]
Strider for NES is quite possibly the most requested game for the Behind the Code series. It feels like it will fall apart at any moment. Random sprites appear in random places on the screen as the frames roll by. What the heck is happening? A minor bug somewhere? Oh… it is MUCH worse than […]
In December of 2019 after many years of runs, the speedrunning record for Castlevania on the NES was close to 11 minutes 24 seconds. In Summer of 2020, speedrunners took a new discovery for the implementation of scrolling for the game and used it to skip several screens at a time in various places throughout […]
If you manage to land a hit on an enemy in Castlevania on the same frame that Simon gets hit, the whip does considerably more damage than normal. But WHY? Let’s dive into the logic flow of the game to figure out the perfect storm of values in RAM that allow this to occur. Timing […]
I thought it would be fun to dig my nails into the code of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for NES – a popular game that seems rather rushed. No surprises – the code is sloppy in more ways than one. Swimming, water current, that infamous Seaweed Screen of Doom, and some weird collision problems on […]
