The Broken Water Level of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) - Behind the Code
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Published 2022-08-05
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[0:00] Opening
[0:49] Level setup
[1:10] Basic Object Collision
[2:40] Bubbles and Current
[4:33] Code Walk: Controller Input and Velocity Application
[10:57] Code Change Proposal
[12:41] Environmental Collision Detection
[17:39] Conclusion and Outro
#TMNT #Turtles #NES
All Comments (21)
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Hope you enjoyed this release! The code of this one feels... rather rushed vs. other Konami entries. If I may - do any of you use channel memberships on other YT channels you watch? I do not currently have it enabled for Displaced Gamers, but I may enable it.
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Programming was harder back then. Without all these debug visualization tools that we have today it was like swimming in a dark. As a turtle. In a seaweed tunnel.
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If they just had good tools to visualize their hitboxes as overlays back in the 80's, they could have fixed a lot of those tricky collision bugs pretty quickly, and a generation of children would have been able to grow up happier.
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This explains so many weird things I noticed as a kid. I noticed the spinning thing was safer to go under than over, but I just thought that was because you were going with the flow, and I can remember devoting hours to testing the point where the seaweed actually gets you. Turtle life after turtle life after turtle life Turtles all the way down
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The fractional current velocity is such a sinister bug that I'm sure has driven countless people crazy over the years. It's basically random ("I swear there was current... No there's not!"), and also subtle, yet it would definitely have an effect on that notorious seaweed screen. How crazy it is to finally learn what was going on after all these decades!
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fun fact: water actually is an electrical insulator, just like it's a thermal insulator It's just that once anything is dissolved in it (which there always is), that changes hard.
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Once you got the visual vectors in there, it blew my mind. Holy crap the person who designed that code must have had zero communication with whoever designed that one seaweed screen. That has got to be the ugliest collision issues I think I ever saw in a game.
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What an interesting topic for a video! It turns out the reasons why people struggled with this level were both fractally complicated, and as a kid you had no chance of understanding what was going on.
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Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I'd be watching a video about code and physics flaws in a game I played more than 30yrs ago. Well done!
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Now you'll need to talk about the jump code in turtles and how overly frustrating it is to get the proper jumps
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This is such a fantastic video, and a revelation. When I was a kid, I always thought this level was intentionally programmed to be cheaply hard, but now i know it’s from programming errors probably due to a multitude of things (time, lack of playtesting, so on)
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It's incredible actually seeing the reason why this level felt the way it did. After all these years it makes sense.
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What I love about these videos is that, growing up, I really wanted to know how to "hack" my NES, but this was in the early days of the internet and I was a little kid so finding anything helpful was hard if you weren't already "in the scene". Watching these videos helps me understand how some of my favorite games work without losing me with a bunch of detailed "0x00AF is then switched to Memory Bus A and a call routine is accessed" programming language that means very little to me.
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The water level's got a fairly steep learning curve, but it comes so early in the game and it's quick enough that by the time you've played it 3 or 4 times, you shouldn't have trouble with it. I've often wondered why everyone makes a big deal out of it. I got stuck a lot longer in the next level when I was a kid. I could never figure out where to go.
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As a speedrunner of this game, I have to say, interesting stuff. Good video.
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I understand most people didn’t make it past this level, but the game genuinely gets harder every level thereafter. 20 years later and I have still never beat Shredder.
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I suppose with no easy way to visualise things or draw vectors back then for NES development, a bunch of hitbox bugs slipped into tonnes of releases. You're doing gods work
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I'm no programmer but this is explained so well that I can understand it! Learning the process raises your appreciation for any art form, so I appreciate this video
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That's incredible!! This explains so much. And I love the code walkthroughs, I'd watch whole videos of that
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I never had much problem with the water level and thought its difficulty was overhyped. That doesn't mean I didn't think the controls were not clunky, they certainly were. Interesting to see why they were.
