Author: Game Infliction

Super Mario 64 Player Finally Found a Way to Open That ‘Unopenable’ Cabin Door Without Cheats

Super Mario 64 players have opened a door that was previously believed to be unopenable, and they did it without cheating.

Detailed by Pannenkoek2012 on YouTube, Discord user Alexpalix1 was able to access the cabin door at the base of Cool, Cool Mountain by using a very specific string of moves and an upset mother penguin (via Tom’s Hardware). Players will likely recognize the location as the same spot where many have dropped a young penguin off of the mountain’s cliff in the Nintendo 64 classic.

The cabin set just to the side of the penguin nest is where you can find Super Mario 64’s unopenable door. It usually serves as an exit for Cool, Cool Mountain’s first stage, Slip Slidin’ Away, awarding players with a Star after they complete the slide and walk through the door. However, Mario is unable to walk back through from the outside, as this half of the door is uniquely missing a doorknob and is blocked by an invisible wall. Anyone who’s played Super Mario 64 has probably tried to walk through the door even if they don’t remember doing it, and now, after 28 years, a solution is here.

Pennenkoek2012’s video walks players through the struggles presented by the legendary door and how Alexpalix1 managed to bypass them. While players have been able to use the mother penguin to make Mario clip through the invisible wall and near the door, they’ve never been able to actually use the door itself to enter the cabin.

Alexpalix1’s new method still guides the penguin up against the cabin, while backflipping in between the blue bird and the building just as others have done before. What they change, though, is Mario’s animation just as he comes into contact with the door’s hitbox. There’s no floor on the other side of the invisible wall that blocks the entrance, and unfortunately for our plumber friend, he needs to be walking when opening a door.

Alexpalix1 tricks the game by turning Mario around just before he falls, allowing him to briefly walk in midair long enough to use the door. The player can levitate for one frame when triggering Mario’s turn-around animation, so even though Mario continues to fall through the floor, the door opens and sends Mario back inside the cabin. Voila!

Players have finally solved a mystery they were never intended to solve after nearly 30 years of work. Unfortunately, it looks like there isn’t really a good reason for anyone to try and replicate Alexpalix1’s strategy. Entering the cabin from the outside does not benefit the player in any way other than providing an alternate entrance to the bottom of the ice slide. As Pannenkoek2012 notes, the doesn’t seem to have any use as a speed-running strategy either, as it’s still quite a bit slower than simply taking the slide down from the top.

For more on Super Mario 64’s endless mysteries, make sure you check out some previously long-lost footage that seems to reveal that Luigi was almost included in the game.

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.

Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.

Soapbox: Paper Mario’s Ms. Mowz Taught Me How To Appreciate (And Steal) The Little Things

THIEF.

Soapbox features enable our individual writers and contributors to voice their opinions on hot topics and random stuff they’ve been chewing over. Today, Kate discusses one of Mario’s criminal — and criminally underrated — pals…

Sometimes I suspect that, in another life before this one, I was a thief. In this life, I’m a relatively boring, mostly law-abiding person – albeit one who’s occasionally tempted to ‘accidentally’ put in expensive produce as something cheaper when I’m at the self-checkout, AKA God’s little test – but when a game gives me the chance to be light-fingered, I go all in.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Elden Ring Fans Already Have Theories About This Newly Revealed Bloodborne-Like Monster

Elden Ring developer FromSoftware has unveiled a new Bloodborne-like enemy that is set to appear in next month’s Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, and fans are already talking about how it will terrorize fellow Tarnished.

The studio pulled back the curtain on its latest nightmare on X/Twitter today. An image of the currently unnamed creature reveals a cloaked, cane-wielding being with a glowing head. The Bloodborne comparisons come from its tentacle-like face, giving the enemy an almost Lovecraftian flair.

“The abandoned and tragic who forage beneath the umbra pray for the embrace of a new master,” FromSoftware’s post says.

Fans were quick to compare the creature to Bloodborne enemies like Winter Lanterns and Garden of Eyes, which both feature large, eye-covered heads and cloaked torsos. Even the image’s grim setting calls back to FromSoftware’s PlayStation 4 exclusive game, signaling to Elden Ring players that Shadow of the Erdtree will, of course, provide yet another challenging and gruesome experience.

While it’s nice to see an enemy that calls back to Bloodborne, most fans are hoping this new nameless being isn’t quite as tough to deal with as something like the Winter Lanterns. Those enemies notoriously built up an annoying status effect known as Frenzy just by being near the player. There’s also the location that the new enemy resides in, which looks suspiciously swamp-like and may or may not be poisonous.

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree was announced in February and has a PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X | S release date of June 21, 2024. In typical FromSoftware fashion, we don’t know much about how the DLC will build upon Elden Rings already great foundation. However, you can read some of what we do know here.

For more on Elden Ring, you can read our 10/10 review. We called the open-world action RPG a “masterpiece” upon its release in 2022, saying, “Elden Ring is a massive iteration on what FromSoftware began with the Souls series, bringing its relentlessly challenging combat to an incredible open world that gives us the freedom to choose our own path.”

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.

Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.

Monkey Island Creator Is Making a Game That Looks a Lot Like Classic Zelda

In 2022, fans of the 1990s adventure series Monkey Island finally got another game with Return to Monkey Island, which notably marked creator Ron Gilbert’s first time directing a Monkey Island project in 30 years. Now, it looks like Gilbert has another project up his sleeve that’s due out just two (or maybe three) years later.

As pointed out by Time Extension, Gilbert has been sharing progress on an untitled RPG that’s described as “classic Zelda meets Diablo meets Thimbleweed Park,” according to studio Terrible Toybox’s website.

Screenshots of the game shared on Gilbert’s Mastodon account show off a top-down pixel art style reminiscent of classic Zelda titles, flaunting a few quaint houses in a woodsy area as well as some classic dungeons, spooky forests, and a cemetery full of skeletons.

Earlier this week, Gilbert also announced that Elissa Black is joining the team as a quest designer. “This ups the chance by 37% that I’ll finish the game before becoming bored and disillusioned,” his post reads.

According to publisher Terrible Toybox’s website, the untitled game will be released in “late 2024 (or maybe early 2025, this is gamedev after all).”

IGN gave Return to Monkey Island a 9 in our review, saying Gilbert’s return to directing a Monkey Island game “meant a lot to me before I ever clicked to start a New Game, and it meant far more after the end credits rolled.” We also crowned it as the best puzzle game of 2022, and it finally made its way to mobile last summer.

Amelia Zollner is a freelance writer at IGN who loves all things indie and Nintendo. Outside of IGN, they’ve contributed to sites like Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun, and they’re currently developing a game called Garage Sale. Find them on Twitter: @ameliazollner.

EA are thinking about inserting adverts into games – but don’t worry, it’ll be “very thoughtful”

The last few weeks I’ve been watching quite a few YouTube videos (thanks, Evo Japan), and noticing that adverts during videos a) seem to pop up every 30 seconds or so and b) then last for an unskippable 30 to 60 seconds. My frustration with being bombarded by YouTube ads in videos for which I pay nothing to watch – meaning that I understand the necessity for ads of some kind to support creators and pay server bills – came to mind as I read about EA’s plans to explore inserting advertising into games, which I pay up to £70 a pop to play.

Read more

Red Dead Redemption PC Port May Finally Be Coming, Datamine Suggests

Red Dead Redemption may finally be coming to PC if a recent datamine leak is to be believed.

What could be the biggest Red Dead Redemption news in years comes from Rockstar Games expert @TezFunz2 on X/Twitter. They report that the new information, which mentions a PC port for the studio’s classic Western sandbox game, was found in a recent update to Rockstar’s launcher site. The datamined content includes details about both the base Red Dead Redemption experience as well as its zombie-themed Undead Nightmare expansion.

“Journey across the sprawling expanses of the American West and Mexico in Red Dead Redemption, and its zombie-horror compansion, Undead Nightmare now playable on PC,” a datamined screenshot from TezFunz2 says.

Red Dead Redemption originally launched for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2010. Although Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 ports arrived last year , PC players were left in the dust. If the datamined information turns out to be accurate and Red Dead Redemption comes to PC before the end of 2024, it would mark the first time the title has been officially available on the platform in 14 years.

Rockstar has notoriously dodged PC ports in the past. Grand Theft Auto 5 originally launched for consoles in 2013 and didn’t make the jump to PC until a year later. Red Dead Redemption 2 saw a similar release strategy, as it launched for consoles in 2018 and PC in 2019. The elusive Grand Theft Auto 6 is also currently listed to release for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X | S at first.

Rockstar leaks have been all the rage among fans recently. Just last week, players began to speculate that Grand Theft Auto 6 news may be on the way after a seemingly premature update for the developer’s website revealed screenshot placeholders. However, as with that alleged leak and today’s datamined information, it’s best to keep expectations low until Rockstar has something official to announce.

For more on Rockstar, you can read our original Red Dead Redemption review. At the time, we awarded the title a 9.7/10, saying, “Red Dead Redemption is a must-play game. Rockstar has taken the Western to new heights and created one of the deepest, most fun, and most gorgeous games around.”

Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.

Be sure to give him a follow on Twitter @MikeCripe.

PC classics Ultima, SimCity and Myst have been added to the World Video Game Hall of Fame

Deep in my heart I know that Hall of Fame-type accolades are largely just a way of dressing up a way of marketing your awards show/museum/whatever, but I also like to occasionally cast away the cynic in me and imagine a world in which this industry’s most important games and creators are rightly recognised, celebrated and preserved rather than being locked away in the vault of billion-dollar companies and left to rot. Imagine!

Read more

Fabledom Is A Fairytale City Builder About Living Happily Ever After

Fable-ous.

Dear Villagers has announced that the cosy, accessible city builder Fabledom — which launched on Steam today — is also coming to Nintendo Switch later this year. Grenaa Games’ debut title will also be getting a physical version alongside the eShop release.

Taking the popular city builder genre and giving it a fairy tale twist, Fabledom sees you creating the perfect kingdom for you and your subjects. Inspired by The Settlers, Foundation, and Kingdoms and Castles, Fabledom aims to deliver a laid-back take on managing, building, and expanding your town.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com