My long quest to revive a 90s Windows gaming classic – Ars Technica

As 2023 draws to a close — and as we begin to finalize our Game of the Year contenders — I have to catch up on an embarrassingly long list of great recent releases that I haven’t made enough time for this year. Instead, over the past few days, I’ve found myself once again addicted to a simple, addictive, and utterly unique Japanese Windows game from the late ’90s that, until recently, I thought I’d lost forever.

Pendulum mania It’s a classic in the truest sense of the word: few people have heard of it, even in hardcore gaming circles, but those who have tried it tend to have fond memories of it. And while I’ve been sharing those memories, it wasn’t until this week that I was able to share my effusive praise for a game whose name and executability had eluded me for more than a decade.

Khaled design

Mechanics Pendulum mania Incredibly simple. You can use your computer mouse to control a metal ring attached to a white ball via an elastic string. The goal is to carefully move the ring so that the stretchy string and gravity can push the ball around a 2D plane, colliding with the floating orbs to collect points (colored orbs that appear randomly can make the ball bigger or the string stronger as well). Be careful, though; If the elastic string stretches too far, it will break and your game is over.

an offer Pendulum mania It certainly betrays its late-’90s homebrew origins, with chunky pixels, daytime explosions, scrolling backgrounds, and music that sounds like a dying cat walking through a synthesizer. However, there’s something appealing about the game’s simple interface and sound effects, which provide quick, quick information about timing, scoring, orb positions for future recording, and how close you are to the elastic string’s boundaries.

Pendulum maniaThe unique indirect control system definitely takes some getting used to. It takes a little practice to learn how to push the ball gently but quickly without hitting the string so fast that it breaks. After a bit of playing, the elegant expansion and contraction of the string becomes part of your muscle memory, and you end up guiding your white ball in gentle ballet arcs across the screen without much conscious thought.

Before long, you’ll find yourself plotting curveballs a few orbs away from scoring ahead, incorporating complex wall bounces and tricky pull-down loops into your repertoire as you seek to stretch the score-boosting combo multiplier as high as possible. After each click of the flex line, it’s very easy to feel that a simple tweak could have resulted in a really great round and that just “one more match” would result in an unbelievably high score.

Lost and found

I stumbled for the first time Pendulum mania Sometime in the late 2000s during one of the deep dives into random web links that were so popular during the early days of the web. I quickly became hopelessly addicted to the easy-to-learn but difficult-to-master gameplay loop; For months, I played daily, sometimes for hours at a time, improving my skills until I could sometimes stretch combos over 100x to get really huge scores.

Eventually, my skills plateaued, and I slowly drifted away from them Pendulum mania In favor of other digital distractions. I managed to largely forget about the game for years, until a few stray thoughts brought back the comforting images of a dotted ball on a string gently swinging around the screen. However, by that point, I had moved to a new computer and a new Windows installation, leaving behind many of the programs I had installed on my old desktop tower.

And while I can easily remember how that felt He plays The game, I couldn’t remember for the life of me Title Or how you originally found it.

Periodic Google searches for “Japanese elastic ball game” and the like only led to dead ends in later years. Despite my desperation, I was never smart enough to reach out to my Twitter followers or helpful people Advice from the My Joystick subreddit To help solve this specific memory issue (it looks like someone else did the digging Pendulum mania In a similar subreddit Back in 2011).

the Yuyuzu GIF game that helped open my file Pendulum mania Memory block.

Fast forward to this weekend, when the long-neglected Playdate sitting on my desk alerted me that there were new games available in its downloadable store. It piqued my interest a little when I scrolled down to Yuyuzu, a game where you “control a space yo-yo — a small, ring-shaped spaceship attached to a ball by a flexible beam,” according to the store’s description. This increased interest started when I saw an animated GIF on… Yuyuzu The store page, which looked like a grainy, black-and-white version of my hazy, unnamed memory of that ball-swinging game.

Quick search for “YUYUZO INSPIRATION” He quickly confirmed that it was no coincidence And that Yuyuzu “is a loving tribute to the 1999 Cano-Lab classic Pendulum mania(Apparently, it is.) Not the first match Which Pendulum mania may also have been directly inspired.) After years of periodic searching, I found the address that had been missing from me for a long time!

Zoom in / Ballastwhich was released on Steam in 2018, also draws direct inspiration from Pendulum mania.

I paid $8 for the download Yuyuzu, partly as a way of saying thank you for removing my memory block. And while the Playdate title was a likable and authentic port of the game I remembered so fondly from long ago, I also found myself missing the colors – and especially the mouse controls – in the game I now know again as Pendulum mania. There was an itch in my mind that could only be scratched by playing the original version again.

Open the windows

With the actual name of the game in hand, you can find a copy of it Pendulum mania It was surprisingly easy. The final version of the game is stored as an 818KB RAR file on the Internet Archive Since 2003side by side Multiple archived screenshots of defunct developer Cano-Lab’s Japanese websiteas I no doubt originally downloaded the game years ago. Pendulum mania It can also be downloaded via a bunch to Abandoned software Websitesalmost all of which correctly identify the game as an addictive hidden gem.

Unfortunately, getting a game designed for Windows 9X/XP to run on a modern 64-bit Windows 10 installation wasn’t just a plug-and-play situation. The first hurdle I ran into was the “D3DRM.dll not found” error, which I was able to fix Download a copy of an old DLL file from a suspicious website.

This DLL allowed me to load the menu but didn’t get me past a more obscure error message when I tried to load the actual game: “640x480x8bit ??????????????????????????? ” Although my system didn’t have the language support to translate these question marks into actual Japanese text, the English part of the error seemed clear enough: I needed to lower the resolution and color depth before I could play.

Unfortunately, diving into Windows settings and forcing a 640 x 480 resolution on my screen didn’t seem to help. Few Scary-looking decision-enforcement aids Benj Edwards, recommended by Ars’ resident legacy computer expert, didn’t provide what I needed either. Despite a little googling Suggest it Pendulum mania May work on WINEAn hour of fiddling with installation scripts and security settings on my Mac left me with a terminal window hanging for all my efforts.

Zoom in / For what it’s worth, Pendulum mania Works fine on a Toshiba laptop that is over 20 years old.

Bing Edwards

Meanwhile, Benj managed to get the game up and running on a “fat Toshiba laptop” running a genuine copy of Windows XP, which made me wish I had saved my old computers as well. However, Benj’s efforts to create a virtual machine to emulate that environment on a modern operating system ran into one bug after another; He stated that even reinstalling Windows 98 from scratch on the aforementioned virtual machine resulted in numerous incompatibilities and crashes.

After all this evasion, I found the final answer to my problem in a description One of the few videos on YouTube of Pendulum mania. This is YouTube He directed me to DxWND, the so-called “Windows Hooker” designed to ensure compatibility between legacy 32-bit Windows software and modern 64-bit systems. To my great relief, this tool worked with minimal setup, finally allowing me to access it Pendulum mania For the first time in years.

While my pitching skills have diminished a bit in the intervening period, the immediate appeal of this gem of a game has not. And the fact that I can still play the game on my modern PC is a testament to the long arc of Windows gaming compatibility between generations over the decades (even if it took some sleuthing for additional utilities to make it work). It’s easy to find more extreme examples of this trend in PC gaming, of course; GOG sells games from the early 80s e.g Akalapith And mule For modern PC audiences nearly four decades after its original releases with the help of Excellent DOSBox emulator.

More than just letting me live out my nostalgic gaming addiction, oh Pendulum mania The saga has made me better appreciate the long sweep of computer gaming history. I can’t help but wonder how many other obscure gaming gems are hiding out there, waiting to create memories for a new audience.