Mr. Resetti is a pretty popular character, but if your first Animal Crossing game was New Horizons, then there's a good chance you may
have never heard of him at all. For those who don't know, every game prior
to New Horizons, Animal Crossing featured... this guy, who would lecture you if you reset the game
or turned it off without saving. Now, this was made obsolete in New Horizons
due to that game's autosave feature... ...but in all the other mainline games where you had to save manually, Resetti was a very prominent character! He even had his own trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee, before Animal Crossing was ever even released in North America. While Resetti does appear in every game, in this video I'll be focusing on his appearance in the original GameCube release, as per usual with this channel. In this original version, Resetti would show up in front of your house every time the game was turned off without saving. He would then lecture the player -- often for several minutes -- about the importance of saving
and not cheating the system by resetting. And, this happens every single time you didn't save,
even if it wasn't your fault. If your power went out... Resetti. If your game somehow crashes... Resetti. If your mother got mad at you for not taking out the trash for the third week in a row and unplugged your GameCube... ... you get the idea. As such, a lot of people found
this character annoying and harsh. So much so that his role has been diminished over time. Admittedly, the GameCube villagers are infamously rude... ...but after he didn't really appear in New Horizons,
I've come to miss Resetti's character and how he got progressively more angry every time you reset. So today, I thought I'd take a look behind the scenes on how
Mr. Resetti actually works in this original GameCube version. If you're like me, you may be wondering
how the game even keeps track of whether or not you reset in order to trigger Mr. Resetti's appearance. Well first, there are special bytes in your save file
that keep track of whether or not you reset. Whenever you load your save file, these bytes are given
special values that tell the game you have yet to save. And, when you're done playing and you talk to your Gyroid to save, the game clears these values and sets them back to zero. To simplify it, think of these bytes as
a special "light bulb". When you load the game, the game checks if this "light bulb" is off -- and if it is off, the game will load normally and then turn the "light bulb" on. So whenever you're in your town, this "light bulb" is switched on and only gets switched off when you talk
to your Gyroid and save your game. This way, if you reset during the
middle of play, this "light bulb" is left on and the next time the game checks it, it
will know you reset without saving. Further, whenever the game detects that this "light bulb" was left on, it will basically increment a special counter on your save file keeping
track of how many times you reset. And the higher this reset counter goes,
the more upset Mr. Resetti becomes. If you're into computer science, I was actually kind of hoping that this counter would be left uncapped to get some potential overflow shenanigans. But, it appears the developers
appropriately handled this counter. Nevertheless, the counter still goes higher than I thought
and Resetti of course acts differently depending on which number reset you're on. All of Resetti's acts are actually pretty amusing... so strap in! Now, every subsequent reset after this will just reuse the same script from the sixth to the eighth reset. This is basically how the developers capped this reset counter. So if the counter is ever above eight, it will just randomly be assigned a new value of 6 through 8. Anyways, that's enough resetting for me for a lifetime. It was actually painfully long to get
all of these resets in for this video, ...but hopefully it was worth it and you learned
something interesting about how Mr. Resetti works. Until next time, thanks for watching!
