[HN Gopher] Pikachu Volleyball
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Pikachu Volleyball
Author : planede
Score : 158 points
Date : 2024-03-06 09:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| planede wrote:
| I randomly remembered this game that we played in high school on
| school computers a lot. I thought that it would be nice to find
| it, reverse engineer it and port it to some modern target, but it
| seems someone beat me to it already for a web version.
|
| There is even p2p multiplayer implemented.
| lawlessone wrote:
| We used to have the shareware version of Skyroads on our school
| computers. They couldn't get rid of it. They'd delete it off
| most of the computers. But a copy would always survive and get
| propagated via USB.
| bitwize wrote:
| Back in my day it was Prince of Persia, Scorched Earth,
| Wolfenstein 3D, and Doom which would somehow make it onto
| every computer.
| iraldir wrote:
| Oh boy did that send me down a trip to memory lane. Played it as
| a kid in France, probably around 2002? God knows where I found
| that.
| hackan wrote:
| Me 2, we found it one day at the school computer, who knows who
| put it there xD.
|
| This is amazing!
| lebean wrote:
| Wow great find! This is uncannily familiar, and recalls for me
| the early, more trusting days of the web where people just
| downloaded and ran executables from anywhere (people don't do
| that anymore right?)
| fsflover wrote:
| > (people don't do that anymore right?)
|
| I do (on Qubes OS).
| tianshuo wrote:
| There is a lot of delay when using the enter/Z button,
| multiplayer doesn't handle it well enough
| coldpie wrote:
| Oh hey, this game. The win32 version of this game uses MIDI for
| its music, and it's a tiny stand-alone executable, so this was my
| real-world test case for validating changes to MIDI support code
| in Wine. The music is very ...assertive... and the voice samples
| are terribly encoded. I can still hear it.
| fraencko wrote:
| This game is similar to Blobby Volley, which was quite popular
| around 2000 here in Germany, I think. The slightly improved
| Blobby Volley 2 [1] is still actively maintained and can be
| downloaded for modern platforms.
|
| [1] https://blobbyvolley.de/download.php
| alejoar wrote:
| I remember playing this with my sister. We were raised in
| Argentina fwiw.
| n4r9 wrote:
| In the UK we played a lot of slime volleyball in the early
| 2000s:
|
| https://oneslime.net/
| gothink wrote:
| Slime volleyball is immediately what I thought of when I
| tried this. We played a lot of that (and slime soccer!) on
| the lab computers at school (Canada).
|
| I had no idea Pikachu Volleyball existed, but apparently it
| predates (1997 [0]) Slime Volleyball (1999 [1]) by a few
| years. I never realized it was essentially a clone.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/gorisanson/pikachu-volleyball [1]:
| https://oneslime.net/kb/A_Brief_History_Of_Slime.html
| coldpie wrote:
| Oh, there were a zillion of these. Ball physics with
| gravity are easy/fun to make, so something like volleyball
| or tennis is pretty much everyone's my-first-game-with-
| physics project. No coincidence they've all got round heads
| :)
|
| The one I remember playing growing up was some DOS
| volleyball game where you played as two hideous little
| purple Q-bert looking dudes. Looks like it even has its own
| Wiki page! Dates to 1988.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcade_Volleyball
| standeven wrote:
| Ha, also in Canada and also played a lot of Slime
| Volleyball in school. I remember the graphics were pulled
| from a folder of jpegs or gifs, so I substituted all the
| images with pictures of my friends and other goofy things.
| Good times.
| tsukurimashou wrote:
| yesss, I used to play this game non stop when I was 10, then
| I discovered slime soccer and other variants, very fun
| fmbb wrote:
| Which is similar to DOS - Arcade Volleyball (1987)
| patwolf wrote:
| Back in the day they used to sell cheap CD-ROMs that claimed
| to have 1000 games. Most of the games were garbage, but I do
| remember Arcade Volleyball was one of the few gems.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| man, that brought some memories of me buying magazines that
| had one full game and another cd with 1000s of demos.
|
| that's how i played the first gta game!
| coldpie wrote:
| Most of those discs are on archive.org these days, if you
| can remember some clue to search for and find it. Pop it
| in a Win95 VM and have a nostalgia-fest evening.
| treve wrote:
| That's the game I thought of too! I have memories of
| teal/cyan CGA.
| boo-ga-ga wrote:
| Oh, these memories:). This game, along with old DOS Arcade
| Volleyball inspired me to create a clone using GameMaker. I
| think it was the first game I created when I was in high
| school:).
| malgorithms wrote:
| I wrote the "ai" for one of the early popular forks of Slime
| Volleyball. I have a lot of fond memories! Recently I wrote a
| modern interpretation of the game in pure TypeScript/html canvas.
| It requires a real keyboard or gamepad - sorry no phones. Some of
| the single player ooponents are pretty fun. It's at
| https://tippycoco.com and it's all open source.
| internetter wrote:
| Wow, that pikachu is a formidable foe
| copypasterepeat wrote:
| Seriously. Is anyone able to defeat it? Is there a trick? I was
| only able to win a handful of points across multiple games.
| planede wrote:
| Yeah, I can defeat it. It doesn't defend long shots very
| well. It's also generally better to try to return its shots
| immediately instead of juggling, so it can't position well
| for the return. If the opponent is close to the net then you
| can try hitting the ball up for it to quickly bounce back
| down behind him. You can also try kill shots near the net,
| but those can be risky.
| b450 wrote:
| Yeah, I spent too much time this morning mastering this
| (thanks for sharing!). For me the key was realizing that -
| unlike most modern platformer controls - jump height isn't
| affected by the length of the key press. So you can quick tap
| jump, then use the direction keys to aim your spikes. The
| ground-dive is also quite useful.
|
| Once you grasp these controls, you stand a chance. Once you
| master them, the AI becomes trivial to beat by this method:
| When serving, jump and perform a horizontal spike at the
| apex. The AI will defend it, then reliably do his own
| horizontal spike from the backcourt. Meet it at the net and
| spike it diagonally downwards. Works every time! And now I
| can rest (work).
| alfonsodev wrote:
| I could only win because I found a trick to score when AI
| serves, jumping backwards one second after AI jumps returning
| long, but timing must be exact, also if you stay in the
| middle 90% of their shots are towards the back very
| predictable and lastly is about the timing every time the
| opponent returns the ball it jumps so when you see a jump you
| can meet the ball in the air for a quick return.
| mtzaldo wrote:
| Yes, there is a trick. If I recall correctly... You can get
| all the way back, and hit the ball from there.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Huh. This plays incredibly similarly to Slime Volleyball.
| https://oneslime.net/
|
| I wonder if there's a connection, like an earlier game that
| inspired both. Slime Volleyball came later than Pikachu
| Volleyball.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| I never played this version of it, but I remember playing Sumo
| Volleyball as a kid. Same thing though. Good times.
| sirohsis144 wrote:
| Sumo Volleyball was one of my favorite games to play growing
| up. We would spend hours after school trying to rank up,
| watching those at the top of the leaderboard play each other to
| see how we could improve our own game. Good times indeed.
| pryelluw wrote:
| Reminds me of a game a built years ago while messing around with
| Godot. The game was called Mortal Pong. It was a mix of Mortal
| Kombat and Pong.
|
| The way it worked was similar to MK except the actual gameplay
| was two character sprites acting as the paddles. You had a MK
| background. Every time you hit the ball blood would squeeze out
| of it. Then the winner of the match would get to perform a
| fatality. But the fatalities were super crude and not well done.
|
| It was a fun game to build and sadly I lost the source.
| karmelapple wrote:
| Mortal Pongbat for classic Mac OS was also great!
|
| https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5394-mortal-pongbat
| pryelluw wrote:
| I didn't know that existed! Thanks for posting. What a
| totally different interpretation of the idea of smashing both
| games together.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| I really miss when the internet was full of games like this.
|
| The Flash game era was great. Lots of ideas and different genres,
| short, free, games, no PhD behavioral psychologists trying to
| figure out how to hijack your brain and get you buying
| microtransactions.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| Is this comment dead? Why is it showing at the bottom, even
| with 8 points?
| pushedx wrote:
| I remember this being the first executable that I ever downloaded
| from the Internet as a kid (around 1998?)!
|
| I can still picture the Internet Exporer progress bar showing 4
| KB/s while I waited almsot an hour for this to arrive. That
| moment of having new software on my computer without having to
| leave the house left a lasting impression on me.
|
| The voice samples still float around in my backup files.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Be aware that Nintendo will eventually DMCA this and potentially
| sue them. Nintendo is a mega corp of lawyers.
| dang wrote:
| We changed the URL from https://gorisanson.github.io/pikachu-
| volleyball/en/ to the one that has more technical detail. Both
| are worth looking at!
| charleshan wrote:
| Oh wow... I used to play this when I was a kid!
|
| Thanks for sharing!
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Ok I spent way too long trying to beat this, but I finally did at
| 15-11.
|
| Basics: You can spike the ball and influence the direction.
| Holding up makes it a garbage hit so you must release jump
| immediately after jumping. This does not affect jump height. The
| two useful options are holding left and holding down, but not
| both (another garbage angle). Left is your bread and butter. Most
| shots should be left. Down works if you're right next to the net
| only, and will depend on where the ball is.
|
| Generally speaking, don't try to spam strikes. Just stay on the
| ground to set the ball. You want to get it nice and slow in your
| center, which will bait ai pikachu into coming forward. then you
| do a left shot to try and get him.
|
| The first few second are the easiest to score on. If ai pikachu
| is serving jump a bit after him and left spike. I score about 20%
| of the time on this return. There's a good chance that he will
| return in a way that is vulnerable to a down spike at the net or
| another left spike, but if you fail to score here, go to the
| neutral game setting tactic.
|
| If you're serving don't hit the ball. Walk forward an inch to set
| the ball in your court and then left spike him after one toss.
| Gets me a point on serve about 1/3 of the time.
|
| Don't jump to anticipate where the ball will go. Wait until he
| hits it at least.
|
| You can also do behind the back spikes which works well for left
| spikes but is a suicide for down spikes.
|
| I only really figured out the downspike at the end. I think I
| could crush him with this knowledge but that took too long.
| jwithington wrote:
| R-D-F-G as the controls is wild lol. Any reason people can think
| WASD wasn't used?
| pvg wrote:
| It wasn't super obvious from the original link but unlike the
| typical web adaptations of old games - cross-compilation and
| emulation, this one was reverse engineered and the logic re-
| created from scratch. The code looks commented with more details,
| e.g. :
|
| https://github.com/gorisanson/pikachu-volleyball/blob/main/s...
| cglong wrote:
| Thoughts on rewriting the decompiled C in JS vs. using WASM?
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(page generated 2024-03-07 23:00 UTC)