Satebo’s Wordgame is a homebrew game for the Satellaview (the Super Famicom extension).
It is an implementation of the Wordle game, developped by Josh Wardle, that became popular in 2021 before being bought by the New York Times.
The game is named after Satebo, one of the two Satellaview mascots. (Satebo: 
) and Parabo: 
)
Why did you spell wordgame in one word? I don’t know, why is wargame spelled in one word?
My prototype was called Super Wordle but I’d rather not get sued by the NYT.
I mostly did this project as a simple way to learn how to make a game for the SNES. So far, all my other projects were just translation hacks so this was all new to me.
Here’s a gameplay video: https://youtu.be/i5349zKPyHg
Download
Satebo’s Wordgame - 1.0.bs
Satebo’s Wordgame - 1.0.zip
Emulation
The game works on:
- snes9x-1.61
- bsnes-plus
Requirement: BS-X BIOS (English) - No DRM - 2016 v1.3
Make sure to turn on the option “Get BS-X date and time from local time”
(It should be on by default in snes9x)
I couldn’t make the game work on:
- no$sns
- bsnes v115
- mesen
Why does the game not work on emulator X?
The game uses the channel feature of the Satellaview (specifically the Time Channel Packet) in order to get the current date and time.
That feature is documented there: SNES Cart Satellaview Other Packets
The current date is used for the Daily Word and the time is used for the timers (I could have used a timer based on the frame count but I needed the date anyway).
Unfortunately, many emulators do not emulate that feature well, if at all. The code I use to read the channel data from the ad-hoc register is taken from the game BS-Kodomo-Chousadan which is itself not emulated well by all emulators.
Gameplay
You have 6 guesses to find a 5-letter word.
Each guess must be a valid word found in the dictionary (the included one has about 13000 words).
The solution is taken from a smaller set of 2300 words.
Game Modes
Practice
Play as long as you want. You can press Select to get a new word.
Daily Word
You can play this mode once a day.
Each day has a predetermined solution.
The solution for a given day is based on the month (mod 8), the day of the month and the day of the week (the Time Channel Packet does not include the current year).
Therefore, as long as the 1st day of the month is different than the 1st day of the same month of the previous years, it will have never-seen-before solutions.
But eventually, there will be repeats in the future. By my calculations, the first repeat will be November 2024, being identical to March 2024. After that, September 2025 will be a repeat of January 2024, November 2025 a repeat of March 2025 and December 2025 a repeat of April 2024.
The repeated month are always at least 8 months (because of the mod 8 operation) or 1 year apart. Considering the scope of the game (and the fact that we all stopped playing Wordle after 2 weeks), that’s a reasonable design trade-off.
Time Attack
Try to find a number of words (5, 10 or 15) as fast as possible.
Challenge
Try to find as many words as you can in 15 minutes.
Like many Satellaview puzzle games, at the end of the 15 min, you are shown a “password” postcard.
The password encodes your score (words and guesses) to be verifiable.
Back in the days of the Satellaview, the St.GIGA office would receive the cards, verify them and reveal the winners the following weeks (on the dedicated show or through the digital magazines presumably).
If you feel like it, you can post the card with #sateboschallenge on Twitter, I’ll verify that your score is legit and may send you a funny gif as a reward.
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