donkey kong

I recently played the remake of The Portopia Serial Murder Case which has me thinking about old Japanese-style adventure games and and when exactly they landed on the modern multiple-selection menus you see in modern games like Ace Attorney, etc.

The earliest Japanese adventure games were for computers and used a text parser system like western interactive fiction games. It was all pure text: you type in commands and the game interprets them, or tells you it doesn't get what you're trying to say. Portopia (1983) is a pretty good example, with a cute extra bit of framing that the things you're typing are actually commands you're giving to your eager second in command in your murder investigation. Check out that "Boss?" text prompt.

@highimpactsex pointed out that the NES port of Portopa (1985) was one of the first games with a menu-based input instead of a text parser. No guessing what the game wants from you - instead, you pick verbs and objects from that text-based menu on the right side of the screen. This one's very simple, but it's actually kind of remarkable how modern it seems. It's not that different from, say, the text-based investigation menus in Ace Attorney.

But when I talked about Animal Land Satsujin Jiken (MSX, 1987) awhile back, I had a bit of a realization. That's also a menu system - but it's a different one. Those numbers on the right side of the screen are a menu system too, it just uses the numpad on your computer keyboard to pick options instead of a curser controlled with a d-pad. When'd that first show up?

I did a big of digging, and I think the answer is Hokkaidō Rensa Satsujin: Okhotsk ni Kiyu, which came out for various computers between 1984 and 1985. This screenshot, for the PC-88 version from 1984, shows the new menu system on the right. Even though you've got the same "boss?" prompt from your junior, this is a totally menu-based game: you can pick your verbs and objects to use from the menu, no more typing or guessing. The part that really surprises me here is that this came out before the NES version of Portopia; I wonder if this is the game that invented the modern style of menu that every Japanese adventure's been using since?

The number-based menu stuck around for another few years - some people might have seen the original PC-88/MSX2 version of Snatcher from 1988, which uses basically the identical system as Hokkaidō Rensa Satsujin. It surprised me at first, but when I had a think about it it started to make sense. Menu systems are all about reducing friction - they're meant to be easier than the old way of typing in commands. The d-pad menu system was picked because there were more menu options than buttons on a game controller... but what if you have a keyboard with a numpad? Why not let you just assign one key to every action?

Given that, it makes sense to me that this kind of menu disappeared not because computer games started copying console games, but because computers started getting mice. AFAICT mice weren't common on Japanese home computers until more advanced models of the PC-98, alongside the X68000 and FM Towns, and games made before that just didn't use them. But as soon as mice showed up, adventure games started using them - hence menu systems where you click different options instead of pressing a key for them, and games incorporating point-and-click elements like Yu-No (1996).

I'd never really thought about it before getting down that rabbithole, but honestly it's pretty cool seeing how this stuff changed over the years.

(All screenshots from HG101 except Famicom Portopia, which I took)

Some really great extra context here in this comment by @umbrellaterms, who goes into a lot more detail on early Japanese IF and covers a bunch of things I missed. https://cohost.org/dog/post/1504908-some-unsorted-though#comment-6ced4252-9edb-42ab-9942-567d08e72e1e

Some recent Sylvie imagery!

There is a widespread meme about "shrimp colors" which hinges on the idea that mantis shimp can see way more colors than us. It turns out this is not true! Mantis shrimp can see ehhh wigglehand, roughly as many colors as humans can.

However, figuring this out required some very interesting science into the mechanics of seeing color, and it paths into the resolution of a second animal-vision myth: cuttlefish are not colorblind, and the explanation for that is even cooler.

Super tl;dr: human vision uses three types of color receptors and make your brain do math to average them out. Mantis shrimp have twelve types of color receptors but don't brain-math so they see slightly fewer colors faster. Cuttlefish don't have color receptors at all and instead use the physics of light refraction (prisms!) to figure out its wavelengths, ie color.

I play a lot of games, and I do pretty well in bracket and on the leaderboards; I'm at the top of the leaderboard for a number of games on Fightcade in a lot of genres, but particularly puzzle games. However, I often chafe at being called a strong player or having commentary or spectators expect me to do well by virtue of showing up.

Usually those conversations begin and end with the amount that I play or the breadth of titles I've played, which frustrates me because I actually don't have that much time invested in a lot of them, and many of them I've picked up in the past yearish. I'm also missing a lot of legacy skills that players with much more invested tend to have, like piece finesse (Specifically DASing to a wall and setting up rotations that way)

So I thought I'd share the specific thoughts and techniques I use to improve: